I'm eating Goldyssoise for lunch, a chilled pureed soup of leeks, potatoes, carrots, dill, and yogurt. And it's especially delicious thanks to the Yukon Gold new potatoes harvested yesterday.

The foliage on my potato plants is lush and vigorous, but they haven't even started flowering yet, so I was surprised to see large mounds of soil starting to dome up at their base. Just an inch or two below the surface, there they were: Plump new potatoes, with a flesh so fresh and sweet that you could almost eat them raw. All I had to do was brush away a little soil and pick them up, causing little or no harm to the rest of the plant.

Damn, potatoes are easy to grow. No wonder they took off so quickly worldwide as a staple crop once they were brought back from South America.