Meditation on the Baked Potato

When my wife, Ann, told me that she didn’t like baked potatoes, I couldn’t believe it. Until, that is, she described what a baked potato was: a lump wrapped in foil, its skin soft and wrinkled, its flesh still hard. I promised that this was not, in fact, a proper baked potato, and that I would make her one: a potato with a skin so crisp you couldn’t not want to eat it, the interior fluffy, steamy, buttery.