By Diana Earnshaw
Like the first asparagus or strawberries, new potatoes are usually eagerly anticipated! So delicious just boiled and buttered (in their scrubbed skins!) with leafy salads, or in a salad of their own. Potato salad is so often bought ready-made, but it is really so simple to make yourself. In fact the first thing to do is boil a few extra potatoes you are cooking for a meal. The following day you are already half way to producing a potato salad! To the diced potatoes, add a couple of chopped spring onions and a handful of chopped fresh herbs. Stir in some mayonnaise/cream/yogurt or a mixture of these – and there you have it! You can of course, vary the ingredients. Try a little French mustard or crumbled blue cheese in the dressing or add chopped cooked vegetables with the potatoes – again making use of what you already have.
Nutritionally, potatoes aren’t at the top of the vegetable list but nonetheless do have a few useful nutrients. B vitamins are the main vitamins, but there is also some vitamin C as well as some minerals such as zinc and potassium. Antioxidants are present too.
New potatoes, when allowed to become cold, contain resistant starch – this is the usual starch present, in an altered state. The starch in potatoes that have been boiled/mashed/roasted etc. is almost all digested in the small intestine. Resistant starch is exactly that – resistant to digestion. Therefore it ends up in the colon where it feeds the bacteria living there. In return for being fed, our friendly bacteria supply us with fatty acids, which we can then use.