Pigeon Potato – Photo: L. Weikel

Short and Sweet…

Oh, you probably caught on to my little word play there, right?

Short and sweet…POTATO, that is!

I know. Hilarious. But hey – it’s way later than usual for me to be starting this post, and I really have to go with the flow. And the flow is telling me that tonight is the night for a post about another weirdly shaped vegetable that’s come into my life.

Yes, an anthropomorphic carrot once had a post of its own, so it only seems right that I would feature this very cool sweet potato that very obviously has avian DNA. I originally titled the photos I took of this root vegetable ‘Goose Potato.’ But upon closer inspection, I’m thinking it much more resembles a ‘Pigeon Potato.’ A sweet pigeon potato, to be exact.

Primitive Art or Random Vegetable?

When I pulled the sweet potato out of the bag of vegetables Tiffany shared with us from our local CSA, Plowshares Farm, I knew it was special. Indeed, I took it outside onto our porch so I could look at it in natural sunlight, because the markings on its head make its ‘beak’ and eye quite obvious.

Karl saw me examining it outside on the porch, saw me photographing it, and even asked me where I’d gotten it. “Tiffany,” I replied.

“What? Did she make it or something?” he asked, bewildered. “Where’d she get it?”

I had no idea what he was talking about, and think I may have been a bit snappish in my response. “Plowshares Farm, where she gets all the veggies,” I responded.

The expression on Karl’s face made no sense to me. It was as if something major did not compute. “What?” I asked, pressing him. “It’s a sweet potato!”

“Get out of town!” he laughed. “I thought it was some sort of primitive art or something – or maybe a sculpture you made yourself long ago.”

I looked at the sweet potato pigeon in my hand and smiled. He’d actually mistaken it for a piece of art – which it is, in its own way. But I knew exactly the little sculpture I had from my childhood that caused his confusion. (I’ll see if I can find it and post a photo of it tomorrow.)

“Nope,” I replied. “Just another weird vegetable –“

“For you to write a blog post about!” he interjected, laughing.

Yup.

Pigeon Potato Getting a Drink – Photo: L. Weikel

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