Beauford Twitty was 11 years old and simply crazy about potatoes. He loved potatoes so much that he claimed to have the only potato museum in the United States – a claim that is actually false, but whatever.
Beauford invited a bunch of kids to his potato museum for a special tasting of Tubers a la Twitty. Beauford explained that Tubers a la Twitty was a secret recipe for preparing the world’s newest potato. Though he kept the nature of the recipe itself under wraps, he explained more about the new kind of potato. It was a superspud bred by his grandfather.
As an added bonus to the day, Beauford said he would be showing off something else his grandfather sent him: a potato signed by the New York Yankees. Why the hell would something like that ever exist? If you’re going to get the autographs of an entire team, you should get it on something that’s not going to completely rot.
The next day, Encyclopedia and Sally got to Beauford’s house and saw a small group of children waiting for the museum to open. At noon exactly, Beauford opened the door and ushered his guests to the basement/museum while he went back to the kitchen to put the finishing touches on his Tubers a la Twitty.
After a few minutes, Beauford called down to tell his “patrons” that the food will be served as soon as he got the table set. Sally offered to help and everyone went upstairs to join her. Apparently the museum was that sucky that everyone couldn’t wait to find some excuse to get the hell out of there.
Beauford then told the group that his folks let him use the kitchen as long as it was clean when they returned from Glenn City that afternoon. So when Beauford’s parents told their 11-year-old son that they would be out of Idaville for a few hours, Beauford asked them if he could invite a bunch of kids over while he prepared something in the kitchen which would most likely require using sharp knives and the stove/oven. My parents would have said, “Absolutely not,” because they were concerned with the safety of me and of invited guests. However, Mr. and Mrs. Twitty’s response was probably more of the lines of, “As long as you clean up, do whatever the hell you want.”
That’s Idaville parenting.
A paragraph is devoted to describing what object each child put on the table (ex.: silverware, glasses, ketchup, napkins, etc.) which means that the solution to whatever mystery about to arise can be found in that paragraph.
Beauford finally unveiled the exciting Tubers a la Twitty, to reveal that they were just French fries. Plain French fries. That’s not a recipe. Yeah, they’ll probably taste differently if they’re made from grandpa’s special potatoes, but you can’t make plain old French fries and give it a different name.
Beauford went to get the potato signed by the Yankees, but it was gone. Who ever took it replaced it with a plain potato, which seems like an amusingly unnecessary step.
Encyclopedia was on the case. He learned that the back door had been unlocked all morning, so he went outside for some clues and went to one of the guests (Flo) and asked for her to kindly return the potato.
How did he know? Well, the part I didn’t tell you was that Flo was the one who fetched the ketchup from the fridge. That tipped Encyclopedia off.
No one knew anything about the recipe other than it was made with a new kind of potato. It could have been mashed potatoes, baked potatoes or even potatoes au gratin. Yet Flo somehow knew that the recipe was going to warrant ketchup. How did she know?
Encyclopedia theorized that Flo must have peeked into the kitchen window to see Beauford preparing the fries and saw that the coast was clear. She then sneaked into the house to steal the potato. There’s no explanation as to how she knew where the potato was, nor do we learn why she went through the trouble of replacing it with a plain potato.
