Cookin' with Starch

I'm of Irish descent, which means that somewhere in my heritage is a fundamental craving - nay, passion - for potatoes. Baked, smashed, boiled, fried (especially fried), sliced into a gratin and slathered with cheese, you name it, I love it.
Which is probably OK. Potatoes are nearly a perfect food. They have plenty of micro-nutrients, a surprising amount of vitamin C, more potassium than a banana - they contain nothing bad for you at all (though when you cover them in sour cream or butter, they maybe start to slide down the health food scale, but I'm not going to let that stop me).
However, I've been a little...bored...with potatoes lately, and have been experimenting with other starches. I did polenta last night. Good, but I need practice. It wasn't as creamy as I would have liked, and I just wasn't able to get the flavor profile quite right. Maybe it was the kale that I used, maybe I didn't put in enough sugar (or too much). A last minute addition of sliced green onions helped, but they sort of over-powered everything else. When was the last time you heard of green onions over powering anything?
The night before, I did one of my new favorites - couscous. I prefer the Israeli stuff to the standard, North African, version. The Israeli stuff is larger, not quite the size of a green pea, but it is large enough to give a little more texture to a dish. The other stuff just seems a little gritty to me. I like to saute' a bunch of veggies in a little bacon fat, add the dried couscous and cook that until it toasts a little, then add some hot stock and simmer it (covered) until the couscous is tender, which takes about 10 minutes. I usually season it with some variation on Harissa, which works nice. I'd eat couscous almost as often as I eat potatoes, if I could.
Apparently it isn't all that hard to make from scratch, either. Just a bunch of semolina with water sprinkled on it, then it gets rolled around into little balls. Seems too simple, which is why I've kept myself from trying it. There must be a trick.
I've also got a pantry full of wild rice. I'm planning on doing a pilaf with it. That can be a little tricky, since wild rice needs more liquid than white rice. I'll need to use two different pots and a lot of stock to get much flavor, but I like the crunchy texture, so it is worth it.
Oddly, I cannot stand the processed pilafs out of the boxes. Not quite sure why that it - I haven't looked at the ingredient lists on one of those boxes in a long time. I'm sure they are processed-to-death, and probably contain some strange things that you wouldn't find in your average pantry, which is why I'd just as soon not eat them. The homemade stuff, though, that is pretty tasty.
But tonight, I think I'm going to have smashed potatoes and gravy. A person can only live outside their comfort zone for so long, and I don't want to use up all of my alternatives too fast. Moderation in all things, right?