12 Crazy But Clever Outside-The-Kitchen Uses For Potatoes

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12 Crazy But Clever Outside-The-Kitchen Uses For Potatoes

Written by: Tricia Drevets How-To S

12 Crazy Outside-The-Kitchen Uses For PotatoesThey’re affordable to purchase, easy to grow, versatile in recipes and are rich in vitamins C and B6, and potassium. They contain no fat, no sodium and no cholesterol, and they produce more food per unit area of land than any other major-planted crop.
They are potatoes, and whether you like them baked, mashed, fried or diced into your soups or stews, you probably have some on your family’s menu this week.
Grown throughout the world today, potato has its roots (pun intended) in Peru, where it was cultivated around 5,000 B.C. The Spanish brought the potato from South America back to Europe, and by the end of the 16th century, families of Basque sailors were growing potatoes along the coast of northern Spain.
Europeans found potatoes easier to grow and cultivate, and the vegetable’s popularity spread. Potatoes arrived in the colonies as early as 1620, and potato patches, largely planted by Irish and Scotch immigrants, were common by the early 18th century. In the 1840s a serious blight wiped out the potato crop in many countries, including Ireland, where the working class had begun to rely on the potato as a meal staple. Almost one million people died during The Potato Famine and another one million people left Ireland, mostly headed for North America.
Today, the potato is the world’s fourth largest food crop, after corn, wheat and rice. The states of Idaho and Washington produce nearly half of the U.S. potato crop.

Traditional folklore reveals many traditional uses of the potato other than food. The Incas placed raw potato slices on broken bones to help them heal and to ease rheumatism. Other folk remedies included treating frost bite with raw grated potato pieces and tying pieces of baked potato around a person’s neck to ease sore throat discomfort.
While some of those ideas have not withstood the test of time, there are plenty of ways you can use potatoes other than as food. Here are some that may be new to you:
1. Tarnish remover. There is a reason to keep the water you use to cook potatoes. It can remove unsightly tarnish from your silverware. After you have boiled and removed potatoes, soak your silverware in the water for about an hour. Then remove and rinse.
2. Rust cleanser. Cut a raw potato in half and use it to clean rust off your pots, pans or gardening tools. The potato’s acid content works to dissolve the rust. If you sprinkle on some salt, you will have even more cleaning power.
3. Eye soother. Similar to the way many people use cucumber slices, you can use raw potato slices to ease eye puffiness and discomfort. Simply lie down for about 10 minutes with raw potato slices on your closed eyelids for quick relief. If the potato is chilled, it works even better…..more here