1: Peel and wash the potatoes
2: Cut them into pieces of roughly 1.5-2 inch radius
3: Boil them for 15 minutes (not in water, but above boiling water, so it's more like steaming them, really)
4: Melt some butter.
5: Place potatoes on an oven tray, and pour a little melted butter over each one.
6: Cook in a reasonably hot oven for about 45 minutes, until they are goldenbrown and crispy on the outside.
7: Yum.
Sage-Stuffed Hasselbacks with Garlic:

Select an appropriate number of russet potatoes, all of similar size and shape, suitable for roasting. Scrub, but do not peel them.

Place two hashi (chopsticks) on a cutting board with a potato between the hashi. Slice through the potato, cutting only down to the height of the hashi and continue with cuts about one-quarter inch apart all along the potato. Put the potatoes on a baking sheet oiled with extra virgin olive oil uncut side down. Salt them and for each potato place three or four small torn pieces of fresh sage spaced evenly between the slices. Peel garlic and place whole cloves with the potatoes.

Bake at 400 degrees until golden brown, turning once. Arrange the potatoes on a serving platter along with the roasted garlic and garnish with a small amount of torn fresh sage.

"What I say is that, if a fellow really like potatoes, he must be a decent sort of fellow." --A.A. Milne

Yam's Roast Potatoes:

(how can you not trust potato information from someone called yam?)

I'm eating these right now. They're really yummy. They're not extremely healthy, but hey, at least they're not deep fried.

Ingredients:
Potatoes. I like new potatoes because you don't have to spend as much time cutting them up. 2 big potatoes, or 4-5 small potatoes.
1/8-1/4 C olive oil
2 cloves of garlic
Half-handful of uncooked pumpkin seeds and cashews
Salt, pepper, & herbs to taste - I use tarragon & paprika because I'm always out of everything else.
Small quantities of cheddar cheese, sour cream, bacon bits, and lox. Yes, lox, as in smoked raw salmon.

Directions:
1. preheat oven to 375°F
2. scrub potatoes and cut in to small pieces, about an inch wide.
3. Pour the olive oil in a small pan. If you only have big pans, or don't feel like cleaning up later, make a little "boat" out of aluminum foil and pour the olive oil in to that. Arrange the potatoes and the garlic cloves (still in their skin!) in the pan, and turn them so they are thoroughly coated in oil. Add seeds & cashews and any herbs you like, but not salt yet.
4. Bake for about 50 minutes. If you'd like to add salt, add it about halfway through cooking.
5. Remove from oven and put in a bowl, being careful not to pour the olive oil in to the bowl. Sprinkle on top: lox and bacon and cheese. Give the cheese time to melt a bit, and spread a bit of sour cream on top. Enjoy. Don't eat the garlic straight. If you've cooked them long enough, the garlic cloves will be roasted to sweetness and gushiness - squeeeeeeeze their tender garlic juices out on to the plate, and any other dish you might have cooked up for dinner.

This makes one serving, but the recipe can be easily increased for any number of people. Just add more potatoes and enough olive oil to coat everything.

A Few Ideas For Roast Potatoes for ailie

Roasted potatoes are one of the simplest things you can do. But you can do it in so many different ways. Here are a few ideas:

Roasted Tatties ‘n’ ‘Neeps with Rosemary
Chop unpeeled russet potatoes in half and then half again down the centre, then slice into wedges. Take the stem and root tips from the turnips, slice in half and then half again. Basically, make the potato and turnip pieces similar in size and weight. Glaze the pieces with extra virgin olive oil, dust with pepper and dried or fresh rosemary. Roast for about one hour, turning and stirring the Tatties ‘n’ ‘Neeps every fifteen minutes or so. Season with salt and fresh lemon juice. Garnish with more rosemary and lemon zest.

Baked Hasselbachs
Select potatoes of reasonably uniform size. Place a washed potato (skin on) between two chopsticks and slice from one end to the other, making cuts ¼ inch apart. The chopsticks will stop the knife from cutting all the way through the potato. Place the potaoes on a baking sheet oiled with a mixture of butter and extra virgin olive oil and coat them with the same mixture. Sprinkle with salt and crumbled sage. Bake until cooked through and golden-brown.

Roast Potato Salad with Sage and Chipotle Mayonnaise
Roast small white new potatoes in a mixture of butter and olive oil, seasoned with salt and pepper. Set aside to cool.Combine egg yolks with extra virgin olive oil and blend thoroughly with a wire whisk or hand blender until aerated and of even consistency, adding the oil in a thin stream. Add finely chopped fresh sage, minced chipotle, salt and fresh cracked black peppercorns and mix thoroughly. Drizzle the potatoes with the chipotle mayonnaise and serve at room temperature.

There are two ways of making these wonderful and hassle-free roasties, one which is a complete no-brainer and the other which is a tad more laboursome but ensures unfailing crispness. Take:

If you can get new potatoes, choose the smaller ones and use them whole and unpeeled. In the case of larger spuds, peel and cut them into quarters or wedges.

Preheat oven to 180C.

Place potatoes in the pan, preferably in a single layer. Drizzle olive oil over them and season well. Shake the pan until all the potatoes are evenly coated in oil. Cover pan in a sheet of tin foil and place in the middle of the oven for 30 minutes. If you have more than one layer of spuds in your pan, stir them half way through baking.

Remove tin foil and bake for an additional 30 minutes, or until you need to serve - these are equally nice when left slightly too long in the oven to brown.

Optionals:

  • You can turn on the grill for the last 10 minutes or so of cooking to add extra crispness and colour.

  • You can throw in any or all of the following to cook together with the spuds: garlic, slices of onion, sprigs of thyme and/or rosemary, sliced button mushrooms.

  • To ensure crisp and crunchy roasties every time, bring a pan of salted water to the boil and drop in your potatoes. Cook until water starts to boil again, allow to simmer for no more than a minute and strain. Now place in the pan and cook as before. This method works better on peeled potatoes, and can be a bit of a waste of time with really small and young baby ones. (I am charged by heyoka to add that if you get the oil in the pan really hot before adding the parboiled spuds and coating them in it all over, they get even crunchier.)

Cooking is not always easy for overly logical people. It requires a qualitative approach- knowing when something is "done" is an art, not a science. Unfortunately I only want to work with numbers and I'd imagine a lot of my fellow maths students are the same- following the instructions on the back of packets to the letter (and usually being disappointed with the results or the need to compromise between two wildly different cooking temperatures for the two halves of a meal). Given that potatoes don't have instructions on the packet- or indeed, a packet- I humbly present here the first in a possible series of Cookery for Mathematics Students nodes- the humble roast potato. I've tried to make the instructions clear enough for me to follow, which should render them essentially idiot proof.

Select 2 potatoes per person, assuming that each person wants 4 roast potatoes and 2 potatoes are of sufficient size to meet this demand- they usually are.
Peel the potatoes. I can offer no useful tips here, as I have the most slow, lethal and blatantly cack-handed approach imaginable. This is because I am left-handed, whereas my mother (who attempted to teach me) is right-handed and slices towards herself anyway. Slicing towards your wrists is a bad idea but I can't find an alternative approach. Slice the peeled potatoes in half to get the desired number and a flat surface that will sit more easily on the tray.

Wash the potatoes using cold tap water, then transfer to a saucepan which should then be filled with enough water to just submerge the potatoes- too much and it'll take longer to boil (i.e. cost more) and too little will cause what's above the water to turn an interesting brown colour. At this point it's perfectly acceptable to leave the pan of potatoes to sit there, so if you're doing a complicated meal and need several things ready at about the same time, you may find it convenient to prepare the potatoes this far in advance of starting to cook.

About an hour and a quarter before you want to eat, proceed to the following steps.
Firstly, bring the pan of potatoes to the boil. This will require the lid to be on the saucepan and the hob to be on maximum power. Once the water has boiled (trust me, you'll know), reduce the temperature to about half the maximum (you can tell my gas ring doesn't have numbers, just pictures of flames) and leave for about 5 to 8 minutes more. Whilst you're waiting, add some vegetable/sunflower oil to a baking tray and warm this in the oven to 180oC - if you don't have a fan assisted oven, you might have to wait 15 minutes or so to hit this temperature so plan ahead. Gas or fan-assisted should get there in time.

Then remove the pan from the heat and turn the hob off so you don't accidently set yourself on fire when you turn around to the sink. Turn around to the sink, and drain as much of the water out as you can without losing the potatoes in the process- the lid will come in handy here. Then place the saucepan on the kitchen side and shake it vigorously in a horizontal motion. This will make the potatoes a bit fluffier and hence crispier when they are finished. If you don't like your roast potatoes resembling a crispy fractal, then you can miss this step- but I'd recommend it.

Now transfer the potatoes to the baking tray of hot oil. As the name suggests, hot oil is indeed hot and is generally nasty stuff. Don't get it on you, especially if you cut yourself using my suicidal peeling techniques earlier. Baste the potatoes by spooning some of the hot oil over the top of them- if you don't have a deep enough level of oil, tip the tray slightly so you can collect it. Generally you want a deep tray so that you'll find it harder to slosh the oil over yourself.

From here it will take about an hour for the potatoes to cook at 180oC. At 15 minute intervals baste them with oil again, and at the mid point turn the potatoes over entirely.

Once done, place a couple of pieces of kitchen towel on a plate such that the edges overhang, and transfer the potatoes onto the plate. Loop the overhanging edges of towel over the top and press down on the potatoes (lightly- this isn't mash we're making) and blot the oil off of the potatoes. Then transfer to the plates you're actually going to eat off (in this way, more washing up can be generated) and enjoy.

As a final note, the oil you used can be reused within the next couple of days. If you won't be doing this (or if you did and it's now a few days old), you've got to dispose of it (fairly obviously). Whilst some people don't advocate it, you can get rid of oil down the sink, but the oil should be cold and flushed down with a vast excess of boiling water (from a kettle- hot tap water is not sufficient in either volume or temperature). Alternatively, if you have such a thing, you can just chuck it in the garden. I make no guarantees that either process is acceptable, legal or hazard-free where you live, so proceed with caution, or as a true student of initiative, leave it for someone else to deal with.

Roast Potatoes


Enough potatoes to feed the party
One red onion
One teaspoon of mustard powder
Two tablespoons of honey
A chilli
Some salt
Some black pepper
Some olive oil.

Chop the potatoes, onion and chilli, and shake everything in a pan until well coated. Tip out onto baking tray, and roast on Gas Mark 6 (160 degrees ish) for forty minutes.


**

This recipe was discovered whilst studying for Biology exams in my second year at Leeds University. I would regularly go around to a friend’s house to revise, and about halfway through the night we would prepare the potatoes, and put them on to cook. As they cooked, we would finish up our night’s work, then once they were ready we would eat them and watch films until the wee hours of the morning.

Part of Devilfloss' Vegetarian Cookbook: A Simple and Accurate Guide To The Revolution

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