11 fun things to do with the humble potato

...from the bland to the bizarre

1  Be Warhol-esque

Make prints. Cut your spuds in half and leave them overnight. Cut shapes like stars, triangles or (if you’re not very artistic - or if you're very artistic) more fluid, fractal shapes. Put paint on a sponge on a plate and dip the potato in it. Stamp shapes out on to paper.

2  Remove

Remove warts, the sting from burns and berry stains from your skin by rubbing them with a cut potato (the warts will probably take longer than the berry stains or burns). Remove salt from a soup when you’ve overdone it by adding a cut potato to absorb the excess.

3  Make money

Bet someone you can stab a (normal but sturdy) drinking straw right through a potato - chances are they won't believe you. It’s possible as long as you don’t hesitate. Go on. Try it. The straw penetrates the potato  because it is a strong cylinder made from thin plastic which also makes it sharp. Cylinders are strong if compressed from end to end, but not from the sides.

4  Use potato power

You don’t usually associate vegetables with electricity, but scientists in Israel recently discovered that zinc and copper electrodes added to a slice of boiled potato generate long-lasting electricity. Why boiled? Apparently, a boiled potato is ten times more electrifying than a raw potato.

5  Compress

Potatoes hold the heat and the cold very well, so they make good compresses. Heat a potato, wrap it in a cloth and use as a hot compress. Do the same with a cold one that has been in the freezer…or you could just use a compress you bought at a chemist, like a normal person.

6  Mask

Take a little mashed potato, add lemon juice and a teaspoon of milk. This (allegedly) makes a great 20-minute face mask. If it doesn’t, you can always scrape off the potato, roll it in to a ball, coat it in bread crumbs and deep fry it to make a hash brown. LOL. This is not so good for your skin.

7  Clean

Potatoes don’t just clean berry stains, they also clean silverware. Soak the family silver (I said ‘silver’, not ‘jewels’) for an hour in water that you have boiled your potatoes in. Remove the potatoes first, of course.

8  Look through a glass darkly (or in any other way)
Rubbing a potato on your specs can stop them fogging up (maybe I’ll be able to read in the bath again, after all). And if your windscreen wipers pack it in, wipe the windscreen with a cut spud to keep the water off (I have actually done this and it works…up to a point.)

9 De-puff

Puffy eyes? Apply a thin slice of cold potato to your eyes and leave on for five minutes. Then splash with cool water, put on your makeup and head to work. If the potatoes don’t work, the Revlon surely will!

10  Make a spudzooka

Fire potatoes out of a cannon – this is a fun project that (in case you need a justification) demonstrates the principles of physics. You can experiment with the basic design to tweak performance and learn valuable engineering lessons. Google ‘spudzooka’ for a how to.

11  Eat (duh...)

They’re not everyone’s plate of dinner but mashed, fried, baked or steamed, spuds rock. See Taste and search for 'potatoes' for something new to do with taters.

Image: Dmitry Maslov