Spud Thursday!

Good Evening and thanks for stopping by. It is not quite the weekend but I am so ready for it to be here. What a week. At work we have gone through two different people who wanted to step in and head up the accounting department and just were not the right fit. Hopefully we can get that all handled in the next week or two. Also, yesterday, Wednesday, the internet went down for the whole office for just under 4 hours. Who realized we were THAT dependent on the internet to keep moving forward. I am now more than ever aware. Further, there is a staff change happening in Vancouver, again, and well, I cannot believe only a week ago I was returning from vacation and ready to hit the ground running. I want to go on vacation again.

Vacations are about a time of going home and relaxing or perhaps going off somewhere and discovering. One thing I do enjoy doing is enjoying comfort foods while on holiday. One that always makes its way on my plate is the ever wonderful potato. Actually I just love, love, love baker potatoes. Often I will use butter or sour cream on them, but I also have opted for cottage cheese or salsa plus the usual salt & pepper make it on the menu for the night. Well, tonight I am enjoying Spud Thursday!
Yes indeed, these tasty treats get to venture in every now and then. I have opted to buying only like 2 or 4 at a time and really enjoying a great potato. There is nothing better and it is a meal unto itself. Did you know that potatoes originated in Peru. YES! I was totally unaware. So while I go and enjoy my all dressed up potato, not quite, but looks almost as good as this...

Here are some insights on potatoes from Wikipedia. I would suggest going there and reading further to see all the cross references as I did take the liberty of deleting all those so as to get this posting to go up and be enjoyed by all of you. Have fun reading and here is to Spud Thursday!

The potato is a starchy, tuberous crop from the perennial Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family (also known as the nightshades). The word potato may refer to the plant itself as well as the edible tuber. In the region of the Andes, there are some other closely related cultivated potato species. Potatoes are the world's fourth-largest food crop, following rice, wheat, and maize. Long-term storage of potatoes requires specialised care in cold warehouses and such warehouses are among the oldest and largest storage facilities for perishable goods in the world.

Wild potato species occur from the United States to Uruguay and Chile. Genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species suggest that the potato has a single origin in the area of southern Peru, from a species in the Solanum brevicaule complex. Although the region known as Peru is the birthplace of the potato, today over 99% of all cultivated potatoes worldwide are descendants of a subspecies indigenous to south-central Chile. Based on historical records, local agriculturalists, and DNA analyses, the most widely cultivated variety worldwide, Solanum tuberosum ssp. tuberosum, is believed to be indigenous to the Chiloé Archipelago where it was cultivated as long as 10,000 years ago.

Introduced to Europe by Spain in 1536, the potato was subsequently conveyed by European mariners to territories and ports throughout the world. Thousands of varieties persist in the Andes, where over 100 cultivars might be found in a single valley, and a dozen or more might be maintained by a single agricultural household. Once established in Europe, the potato soon became an important food staple and field crop. But lack of genetic diversity, due to the fact that very few varieties were initially introduced, left the crop vulnerable to disease. In 1845, a plant disease known as late blight, caused by the fungus-like oomycete Phytophthora infestans, spread rapidly through the poorer communities of western Ireland, resulting in the crop failures that led to the Great Irish Famine.