Patata Gigante

It is often said that romance is dead. I overheard Señora Comecocos whispering to Don Duende this evening "My idea of heaven is a great big baked potato and someone to share it with." Ahhhh sweet.

Factoid: Potatoes are the world's most widely grown tuber crop, and the fourth largest crop in terms of fresh produce after rice, wheat, and maize. The potato originated in South America, somewhere in present-day Peru. The Quechua word for potato is papa. The first European to see the potato was Pedro de Cieza de Leon (1518–1560), a Spanish Conquistador and historian. In 1540 he wrote about the potato in his chronicles, Chronicles of Peru.

Spanish explorer and conqueror, Gonzalo Jiminez de Quesada (1499-1579), took the potato to Spain in lieu of the gold he did not find. The first record is from Sevilla, around the year 1570. From there the potato spread to the rest of Europe, North America, Africa and Asia. The name "potato" comes from the Spanish word batata, meaning sweet potato, Ipomoea batatas. The sweet potato had arrived much earlier; Christopher Columbus himself had brought it back from the Caribbean. The potato has only a very distant relationship with the sweet potato, but because the edible part of both crops is an underground organ (a root in the case of the sweet potato), they have often been confused. In Spain, the potato is now called patata.