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Habits and customs
Potatoes are good
Potatoes are good for you. It's been said time and time again. Vitamin C (one single average sized potato contains half of the daily required intake), proteins, salts and much more. They are an excellent source of nutrition, but not only. What about medicinal properties? Just like its siblings in the Solanaceae family (which often contain poisonous or narcotic properties), the potato is slightly hypnotic and anti-spasmodic: excellent therefore for cramps, ulcers, nervous coughs, asthma, epilepsy, insomnia and neuralgia. Potatoes are also soothing: they offer great relief to all forms of catarrh, and dry tickly coughs.
How to use them? A concentrate of fresh leaves (20g in a liter of water). And not only: grated and applied as a poultice, they calm skin or eye irritation and applied to burns, they will ease the pain. What's more, for swollen feet or ankles there is black tea with dried potato peel, but there are those who swear by putting raw potato slices directly on the feet. From gentle phytotherapy we have easily passed to old wives' remedies and beyond, into the realm of urban myth. There are people who maintain that potatoes will get rid of an incurable headache. How? By applying raw potato slices to the temples: a miracle!
Potatoes are beautiful
Because of its detergent and emollient actions, the potato can be used in cosmetics to prepare masks for greasy skin or wrinkles. Here is how to make a facemask for greasy skin: mash a boiled potato with two spoonfuls of milk, adding half a spoonful of lemon juice. Mix together and apply to the face for 20 minutes. Rinse off with plenty of lukewarm water. But the romance between tubers and masks doesn't finish here. How can we forget the deep-sea diving mask? All over the world, to stop the mask misting up, people spit inside it before going into the water. But true snorkeling buffs, ever on the lookout for new tricks, know that rubbing a freshly cut potato half over the inside of the glass will prevent misting. There is an indisputable scientific reason for this: like saliva, potatoes contain an enzyme that makes the tiny drops of condensation colloidal, and so they roll away to the edges of the mask.
Unorthodox uses
Potatoes don't only clean the face. They are excellent for cleaning silver, and will bring a shine to furniture and leather. However you should avoid wiping soup tureens and cupboards with an actual potato. You should use the water that the potatoes have boiled in. But that's not all. If you have to clean a bottle, put a raw potato inside, peeled and chopped into tiny pieces. Add a spoonful of rock salt and two spoonfuls of water. Shake vigorously and rinse. True friends can be counted on the fingers of one hand. For the housewife, one of these friends is the potato: potatoes will rush to their aid in the fight against the shiny patches that can appear, for example, on a pair of woolen trousers after ironing. Help is at hand: pass a raw potato slice along the mark and then brush well.
Play with potatoes
You need:
Potatoes
A knife
Poster paint
A dish
Sheets of paper
How to do it:
Cut the potatoes in half and then carve a particular design into each half (a star, a heart, a dolphin...). With the knife, remove the part of the potato around the design so that the design itself stands out, creating a kind of "printing stamp", with the image in relief. Mix some paint in a dish and press the potato into it. You can then use the colored potato to print the design onto envelopes and sheets - which you can use immediately as original party invitations!
(09/06/2006)
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