A Blog Post For Kristin

It was my turn to cook at work the other day. We take turns at the firehouse. Firefighters, generally, are very good cooks. It’s an unwritten rule that you learn to cook if you want to be a firefighter. Each of us has 4 or 5 recipes that we call our specialties. Some of the guys are excellent cooks at everything they make. So I was cooking. One of my specialities is good old fashioned roast and mashed potatoes. Many of the old timers are true meat and potato type guys, but the younger generation, and I include myself in that group, are trying to eat healthier. The other night though was a meat and potatoes kind of night. While peeling the potatoes my mind was taken back to the good old days of college. Utah State. Roommates.

In college, I was poor. Living off of student loans and telemarketing jobs. Twenty pound bags of russet potatoes were cheap, and made for great meals. As Freshman, we had potato nights. Potato nights were typically late Sunday nights, near midnight, after those that went home for the weekend to see their girlfriends got back to the apartment. (I hardly ever went back home on weekends, just for the record.) We would peel and boil all twenty pounds and make mashed potatoes and then live off of them for the week. It was a refreshing change from Ramen. It also seemed like Beavis and Butthead was always on the TV during potato night, and I can still hear Matt Earle laughing along to the toilet humor that was so entertaining. I watched Beavis and Butthead the other day, it has been remade and shows on MTV again, and I can’t see what made me laugh back then. Is this the first sign of getting old?

Potatoes were a big part of our college lives. After a dinner activity between ours and neighboring dorms, we somehow acquired all the left over baked potatoes. We kept many them in the fridge, but also had plenty to spare. Someone came up with the idea of taking around a video camera and knocking on the doors of the girls’ dorms asking them to do something unique for a “prize.” Of course the college girls were more than happy to show off for a video camera. (Mom, if your reading this, I swear that all the filmed acts were rated PG-13 at the worst.) These college women were not at all happy to receive a baked potato for their surprise gift. It did, however, make for additional entertaining video. I wish I still had that video. One scene involves Dave Rock (for those that knew him) challenging a girl to a wrestling match and then getting his butt kicked by her. If the girls refused to do anything for the camera, we simultaneously asked them at the top of our lungs if they would “do it for a potato?” Yeah, we were pretty much nerds. No wonder none of us married anyone from our freshman year of college, right?

Dinner at the station was delicious, and it was quite a bit more mild making the mashed potatoes than what I have described above.