I Found Potatoes In My Pantry (& They Scared The Hell Out Of Me)
July 19, 2009 by ybonesy
Other titles I thought of for this post:
- Night of the Living Spud
- Eek, a Potato!
- The Root of All Root Vegetables
- I *am* a Green Thumb Afterall!
Please, add your own. Or, write a haiku inspired by these taters. Heck, how about a Writing Practice on Everything I know about potatoes…. Go!
Thank you for your comments & for sharing:
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Posted in Everyday Art, Food, Holding My Breath, Home, Laughing, Life, Photography, Random, Wake Up, Word Of The Day, Writing Topics | Tagged food gone bad in the pantry, images of potatoes growing roots, potatoes | 29 Comments
redravine.wordpress.com 
LOL! Those potatoes have taken on another life (or are becoming another life-form).
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Wow, yb. I love those photographs of potatoes. A great Writing Topic, too. We might have to write on it this week. Love Night of the Living Spud. 8)
The thing about potatoes is that I put them in dark places so they don’t go bad, then forget about them. They come out looking similar to yours above. Remember when people stored potatoes in root cellars?
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In our kitchen is an old-fashioned potato storage cabinet, you know, with steel pull-out bins and slats in the wooden door to allow ventilation. Well, I put the potatoes in there two years ago and forgot about them. (Not really. But might have been six months ago or more.)
I kept noticing a musty smell in the house whenever I walked in. Then I found the root (ha) cause.
They are/were another life form. Alien spudniks.
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yb, I laughed so hard when I read this! The photos look like many that I also find in my pantry. Some roll out of the bag & the smell can be pretty gross until I locate the problem. D
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When Jim saw the photos, he said, Well, did you plant them? Hell no! They freaked me out so much that I immediately got rid of them. Well, after quickly taking photos of their tentacles.
8)
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They almost look like pieces of coral! And they would have scared the crap out of me too!
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Exactly what a friend on Facebook said, tpgoddess.
I don’t think I’ve ever in my potato purchasing and storing years seen such a fine example of my forgetfulness.
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YB; this post is just TOO funny! I have forgotten my share of them too; even had some that were actually oozing a foul smelling foam!
Shortly after my marriage, I was helping my mother in law prepare a meal. and she gave me the chore of peeling potatoes. Well, the spuds she handed me from her old fashioned bin were almost, but not quite as shriveled, as those in your photos. (Mr. & Mrs. grandma & grandpa potato heads.) I would have thrown them away, but she obviously expected me to peel away. I did so, but not with a standard peeler…I had to use a paring knife to get down to the edible part!
BTW, have you ever seen potato bugs? We had them in our back yard in L. A. where I grew up. They are ghostly pale, usually found under rocks, and about the UGLIEST bugs I have ever seen..(shudder!)
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Ybonesy – tpgodess is right on the mark they are…Earth Coral.
I hate to admit this, but my vehicle housekeeping is not up to snuff. One year i forgot a bag of potatoes and had a moving potato patch in the trunk. It did smell sort of fusty in the car, but in spite of trying air fresheners and deodorant rocks, found the smell lingering. One fine day i needed to stash something in the trunk, and lo and behold this amazing bleached tentacled entity had taken over the whole space. i hated to disturb it, as it was a most wondrous thing to look at. Once it had gone, so was the smell. G
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Tentacles? No! Antlers, yes! You should’ve saved them for deer season, then bragged about bagging a 10-point spud! 😉
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Very funny story, oliverowl, esp given that the expectation was that those old potatoes were to be used. I have used some pretty soft potatoes before just because I’d already started cooking and didn’t have time to run to the store for new ones.
Also, YES, I’ve seen potato bugs and have featured their ugliness on red Ravine. They are freaky. In my neck of the woods, the potato bug is called Child of the Earth. Check out this post: WRITING TOPIC – INSECTS & SPIDERS & BUGS, OH MY!
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G, sounds like you had an entire underwater coral garden in your trunk. No wonder you hated moving it. That is so funny. I’m surprised the smell didn’t linger. Oh, and vehicle housekeeping is not my strong suit, either.
LOL, Sam. That made my morning.
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At least they look fairly dry, its when they’re oozing and wet that the smell gets really bad – it happens to me often.
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I was relieved they weren’t oozing yet, although if they were oozing, they might have been less creepy. These ones were so very alive, and when I picked them up I half expected their roots to grasp my hands back.
Thanks for dropping by, Suzi. 8)
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The coral reference, I’m glad that came up several times. Here’s a link to a picture of soft-coral. Maybe your potatoes had an affair with a polyp…
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so…..i guess you wouldn’t eat those…..
i have six sweet potatoes that i just found (no kidding) in my pantry. other than the icky foliage, mine look edible…..possibly…..?
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I’ve grown my share of “potato coral” and should have thought like Jim and planted them. I think if I did I probably wouldn’t have to buy potatoes again for some time. Great shots and funny titles. Thanks for the laugh.
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I’d have thought they would have started to smell. Did you put them in the ground and see what kind of plant you might get?
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Hey, Jules. They did smell, but not like rot. They smelled like earth, so every time we came into the house you got this old musty smell. I did not plant them. Should have, although this weekend we bought potatoes from a friend a growers market, and my goodness, those were the smoothest, creamiest potatoes I’ve ever eaten. Their skin was deep red. Not Russets, something much more exotic. If I ever plant potatoes, I want to plant that kind.
R3, Jim and I did grow potatoes once a long time ago. They’re such a strange crop to grow in that you dig in the dirt to reap the harvest. But you know, it is said that potatoes are one of the foods you really do want to be organic, precisely because they do go into the dirt and absorb all the chemicals that are generally used on them (if they’re not organic). Jim always buys organic potatoes. And you usually eat almost all of the potato, or at least we do, except for Russets. Yellow or red-skinned potatoes, we always eat the skin.
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judy, how funny. I’d give ’em a try, especially if they’ve still got some firmness to them. With sweet potatoes, you can also make a sweet potato pie, which, I imagine, can use potatoes that are a wee bit overdone. If you do, invite me over. Ha!
amuirin, so glad you included that link. Amazing resemblance. Ha, an affair with a polyp. 8)
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Musty, Dusty, Dirt
Tentacles, watching, seeking,
reproducing spuds
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Great post yb, and comments all around. Laughed my butt off at the photos as it’s something I think we’ve all done at one time or another. They do have their very own funky smell, don’t they? (Smell is a big memory trigger for me and vice versa – vivid memories elicit a hallucination of odor.)
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Whoaa. They are some potatoes. Hope you planted them so they can seed more potato babies.
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Holy Moses…you just gave me a great, cheap idea for my Alien Halloween theme. One persons’ horror is anothers inspiration! That is wicked cool! Imagine green glow-in-the-dark paint on those things…maybe some tiny flasher lights hidden inside!
Wow! thanks yb 😉
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Holy cow, Heather, an oozing potato haunted house?! Revenge of the potato! Giant Mr. and Mrs. Potato Heads. Medusa roots that trap visitors. Smelly rot. Hmmm, somehow I can’t picture it. (Not.)
Thanks for stopping in Maxine. No potato babies in our family. I flung the potatoes into the trash before they could consume me and my family. I actually feel bad about it. They were living things. 😦
Norm, a hallucination of odor. Sounds like the title of a memoir. Wow. Can you imagine all the essays that could be compiled all about odor.
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Ha, ha…. 10 minutes on ‘hallucination of odor’. Go!
That would be quite a compilation, wouldn’t it? The good, the bad and the gross.
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Or, The gross, the grosser, and the grossest.
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