Around here, St. Peter is an indirect patron of potatoes, through his patronage St. Peter’s Abbey in Muenster, SK.
It is a fall-time tradition at St. Therese Institute to make a potato pilgrimage to St. Peter’s College and Benedictine Abbey in Muenster, SK, about 40 minutes west of Bruno, to help St. Peter’s people pick their prolific patch of potatoes.
We celebrated the annual “potato day” last Wednesday, at St. Therese Institute. As we do every year, the whole community joined in to pick and process the harvest. After the work, we enjoy a fresh french fry feast at the end of the day. That feast gives the day its unofficial name, which can result in confusion when it falls mid-week…
“Hey, it’s Fry-Day today!” I declared at our Wednesday morning team check-in.
“Ummm… It’s… Wednesday… not Friday” one of our Interns replied, in confusion. You could almost see a Processing – Please Wait… progress indicator bar moving behind her eyes as she mentally checked the calendar in her head before concluding I was obviously in need of more coffee.
“Exactly!” I replied emphatically. “That’s why it’s Fry-Day!”.
File corrupted… Unable to process… Reboot in progress… Logging in… “Oh, you mean THE fry day!!” she exclaimed, as the reference clicked into place.
Whether you called it Wednesday or Fry-Day, this year’s Potato Day came on an overcast but warm fall day. Our own St. Therese Institute potato patch failed this year due to beetles, but the St. Peter patch propagated plentifully. We are thankful for the bags of spuds and corn that the monks sent back with us, for our tables and our cellars.
The Fry Day supper we had this year after the work was done – fresh cut then fried potatoes (with optional cheese and gravy to poutine-ize the fries), fresh fire-roasted corn, and hotdogs out at the fire pit – was something to write home about! And, while it’s wonderful to have an abundance of locally-grown spuds in our cellar, packing the produce home isn’t the only purpose of this prairie potato portage.
Chatting with our Gap Year and Mission Year residents afterwards, I heard about the value of the experience for them. Some, like Jeff Vizeacoumar, have not had any prior gardening experience. They appreciated the chance to be involved in the food production process and to discover how amazing “fresh” can taste.
Jeff said, “Growing up in the city, I’m used to food just arriving from the grocery store. Today though, we got to pick the potatoes with our own hands, wash those potatoes, cut those potatoes, fry those same potatoes, and then eat them. I’ve never tasted fries so fresh and amazing! And it was great to be involved in the process all the way from picking to eating.”
After initially being disappointed at pulling up a plant to find very little yield, Élyse Raymond got really excited when she realized there was a trove of large tubers hidden deeper in the soil. Knowing Élyse, the find was probably marked by spontaneous jubilation. “I got excited about a lot of big potatoes!” she admitted. How often do we take people and situations at surface value, when rich discoveries could be unearthed if we just look deeper?
Other participants enjoyed meeting and working alongside the monks: hearing their stories over cookies; meeting one of our parish’s former pastors (Fr. Cosmos, who lives in a hermitage on the Abbey grounds); and getting to tour the Abbey itself.
Emma Skuban observed: “We spent the day serving others and working together. It was a real reminder that when you truly give, you never come away empty. I was also thinking how tending a garden connects us back to Adam and Eve, and how we are all called to be good stewards of the gifts we are given so that the harvest may be holy and bountiful.”
Kateri Godin reflected: “Potato Day was a good break from the talks and sessions we’ve had during orientation. It was good for us to do something physical and have time to chew on the things we’ve been learning in class. It was a reminder of how doing little things, like working with our hands, is important – it can actually save souls! And, digging deep into the earth reminded me of what we do in the St. Therese program: dig deep into ourselves and the faith.”
Regardless of what the events of the day are called, all agreed they were excellent this year. The only negative reports concerned the over-stuffed tummies many had to endure that evening (myself included: but that last jalapeño-dill batch was sooo goooood!).
Thank you to St. Peter’s Abbey for asking us to participate in the potato pick, for the opportunity to visit, and for the gift of potatoes and corn. Thank you as well to the Bruno Lions Club for the use of your deep fryers. And most of all, thanks be to God for all the blessings he bestows, tater-shaped or otherwise.
