Ladies and gentlemen, I present you todays view from our house! Haunting, isn’t it? It’s so amazing, I love it, the city is all lightened up and white due to the contrast and dark sky. It’s almost like we are looking from behind a black & white filter.

But clearly not a very summery view. So today I made a in between winter and summer dish. It’s a bit heavy – with mostly canned veggies – fitting to the wintery wet weather and a bit fresh to compensate the weather. It tastes perfectly and it’s quick, so worth sharing with you.

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Ingredients (for +/- 2 people):

  • young potatoes (200 gr)
  • chickpeas (one small can +/- 100 gr)
  • artichokes (one small can +/- 100 gr)
  • chopped tomatoes (one small can +/- 100 gr)
  • fresh thyme (1 teaspoon)
  • fresh rosemary (2 teaspoons)
  • fresh oregano (1 teaspoon)
  • salt (to taste)
  • pepper (to taste)
  • cucumber (for the salad)
  • balsamico (for the salad)

Cook the potatoes (in their skins) with some salt in water for about 15 minutes. Prepare an oven dish in the meantime and grease it in with some olive oil (be generous). Place the chickpeas, artichokes, tomatoes and the herbs (all cut) in the oven dish and when the potatoes are ready cut them all in half (if they aren’t very small already) and also place them in the dish. Then hustle everything together, place it in your oven at 200 degrees celsius for another 30 minutes.
While that is preparing, cut a cucumber in slices and mix it up with some balsamic vinegar and salt. Now you are ready to serve.

darkages6It tasted so good that I decided to try to regrow some of the potatoes we used in the dish, against all odds, since march/april are more usual months for planting potatoes. I will try anyway. Below you can see how you – apparently – should plant potatoes in plastic bags.

darkages1You need some soil, a few old soil bags and some sprouting potatoes (now this is not the right potato I’m using and it’s also not sprouted, that’s something that’s not advisory). I also took a knife and sliced one of the potatoes in half to see if the method of slicing-the-potato in half works better than the other methods (aghum, I clearly didn’t mark the bag I’m realising now ;)). darkages2Anyway, you turn the bags inside out. When I read that instruction I thought – ah, that’s probably to make the bag look more appealing, but turned out not to be the reason. It’s creating a darker environment for the potato and potato likes dark environments.

darkages3You place 15 cm of soil and then a (sliced) potato and then again the same amount of soil (you can also place some more potatoes and more soil for the first time – I’m going for it conservatively today). Push it a bit, add some water and you’re done. If  you do it with the right potato and at the right time of the year you will get some greens, then you place again some soil on top to create more roots so that you get more potatoes in the end.

darkages4When the growing season is done, you just open the bag and collect your potatoes. I wonder if we’ll get any crop out of this, but it’s a nice and pretty cheap experiment. I’ll keep you posted! For the dutchies, my favorite belgian garden guy explains all this potato stuff more accurately.