This past weekend was Valentine’s Day, and I’m not a very mushy person.
I guess used to be… in like middle and high school, when I was still buying into all that crap. And I guess when I got married the first time, I was kind of romantic. Now, though? I’m over it. Mostly because I see it for what it is. Nonsense.
I why-ed down all the things I thought were romantic until I figured out they weren’t to me. Or I figured out why I believed them to be romantic in the first place. Mostly, it was because folks told me they were. And then movies and television and music and art and all the rest of it just drove the point home.
I realized I was romanticizing things other folks found romantic. Not things I appreciated.
Movies’ll have you believe that a bouquet of grocery store flowers means more than buying 100 tulip bulbs for me to plant in the yard. Song’s’ll try to convince you that a steak dinner out in a restaurant with candlelight and fancy wine is more romantic than going on a three-county hunt for a bottle of Chablis so you can recreate that single, crisp glass you had while adventuring in the liminal spaces beneath 30 Rock in NYC.
I still have not been able to recreate this taste, but I’ve gotten close.
All of this and well and good, and I could talk more about how I fell out of love with traditional romance in another post (and I probably will). However, this post is about my most recent love, the one I fell head over heels for.
My Potato Brush
Y’all, we eat a lot of potatoes. Yes, there was a time in our lives (about a month) when we literally ate nothing but potatoes. Mostly baked whole or chopped up and air-fried. My Irish ass was loving this time in our lives. I fucking love a potato, bro.
So what I’m saying is… I’ve cleaned a lot of potatoes in my day. In Florida, I had a potato brunch that was fine, and it did the job. I do not even recall what it looked like. By the time we moved, it was all floofed out and ready to be put down, so I did. I tossed in the big dumpster we rented for the front yard and planned to do some serious research to find the best potato brush in the entire land.
So we moved, and things were weird for a while, so I didn’t buy potatoes. We lived in a hotel at first and then spent some time settling into the Professor Haus. We ate a lot of soup at first, so a potato brush wasn’t necessary… until it was.
The research began. I wanted something all natural and smol, because my hands are quite tiny.
This is what I ended up with:
Y’all, I hated this thing. The loop was hard to hold, the brushes weren’t stiff enough to make a real dent in potato dirt, and it simply didn’t do the job. But, me being me, I suffered through this thing for about 2 years before finally giving up.
And by giving up, I mean coming upstairs after cleaning potatoes with this subpar potato brush and complaining about it to my partner. Thus, we started the potato brush deep dive anew.
After reading numerous Reddit threads and product reviews, he narrowed it down to two.
- A bamboo loopy one that I already had
- it was extremely well-reviewed
- he never cleans the potatoes, so he has no idea what it looks like
- A green, like, all plastic, all fake one
- it was bendy
- it had short bristles
In two days, the green fakey arrived.
I made potatoes that night and never looked back. This is, hands down, the best potato brush I’ve ever used. The short bristles mean I can aggressively scrub my skins, and they don’t get all wooshly. I love that for them.
And just look at how perfectly it fits inside my palm!
There is something meditative for me about cleaning potatoes. I’m Irish, so I assume, like, most of my relatives have done this for the bulk of their lives. The lady relatives, at least, although I hope in more recent years the menfolk got in on the potato scrubbing parties as well.
Why Do We Even Need to Clean Potatoes, Jacki?!
Welp, do you know how potatoes grow? They look like an apple tree to me. Except the “apple” part is potatoes, and the potatoes are in the ground.
You know what else is in the ground? Dirt, bacterica, bugs, animal waste… and that’s just offa the top of my head for the potatoes we grow in the backyard. Who knows what sort of chemicals or pesticides are on the ones you get in the store? I do not, so you know what I do?
I wash my potatoes with the passion of someone with OCD. Ugh, it’s so satisfying.
I love scrubbing potatoes so much that I took before-and-after pics so you can see just how good this brush is. These are store-bought and not Jacki-grown potatoes.
Impressive, right? Okay, well, maybe not. These pics do not show how much dirt this little green boi scrubbed off my potatoes.
Also, you may be wondering why there is one red potato mixed in with all the russets. I cannot tell you. My bag of russets came that way. A potato mystery, I guess.
So, don’t tell Mickey, but I have a big crush on this potato brush. It’s the best, and we eat a lot more potatoes because of it. I ain’t mad at it.
I don’t get any money for this, but if you’d like to similarly change your potato washin’ life, say hello to the hottest brush in town. I hope you love it as much as I do.
