Bake Red Potatoes? Yes, You Can

Some time ago I happened upon a site that promised a recipe for perfect baked potatoes. I tried the method, and by golly, they were perfect.

But having stumbled onto a really good price on red potatoes (ten pounds for $1.98? Now that's good) I wondered whether or not they'd be any good baked, as all the recipes I could find insisted on russet potatoes.

Really. All of them. If you "google" red potatoes baked, you get hundreds of recipes for cutting the red potatoes up and roasting them. "No, no, no," I said to the computer, "I don't want to cut the potatoes up, I want to bake them." The computer shrugged and yellow letters on a red screen said If you don't like my answers, then don't ask me.

If I tried baking red potatoes, and it didn't work, I'd just have to make them into country style hash browns. That means a win-win situation. And was it ever a win! The red baked potatoes had an almost creamy texture that won the family over into never using russets again if we can get red potatoes. And here's the method I use:

Red potatoes a little smaller than my fist. Honestly, no matter how good it tastes, a red potato that size is a goodly portion. You don't need to eat baked potatoes the size of footballs. Let's start again...

Red potatoes, scrubbed, with no sprouts. Dry them.
Use a little extra virgin olive oil and make their red skin shiny.
Sprinkle with kosher salt. (The flakes of kosher salt stick better.)
Bake on a cookie sheet in a pre-heated oven at 350 degrees
For one hour.
Test with an instant-read meat thermometer -- 210 degrees means your potatoes are done.

Eat. Butter and sour cream or whatever you love on baked potatoes. Enjoy.

No, you don't have to cook them on a rack. No, you don't have to pierce them.

Red, not russet.

Yum.

Makeover

Halloween, of course.

After an hour and 45 minute ride this morning, I was too tired to do anything really elaborate for Halloween, especially since Bernie and I had the afternoon slated for playing with hot oil and potatoes. Sounds fun, yes?

The ride was great, the horses moving briskly, engaging us riders and affording some entertainment as horse and I chased some ill-behaved and illegally loose little dogs that attempted to threaten us.

The slivers of potato I tossed into the fry oil in seconds produced some really tasty experimental potato chips, and then, with Bernie's tutelage, we made french fries, not the hit-or-miss taters that my mom occasionally tried, not the mealy mess that restaurants usually serve, but delectable treats so luscious that Lillian and a friend could not keep their hands off them, and we ended up sending them outside with a pile of them so that the friend's brothers could have a taste, too.

While I was checking email after that yummy midday meal, I found myself thinking about last Sunday's NFL game between the Washington Redskins and the Pittsburgh Steelers, and how the really ugly striped "retro" uniforms probably contributed to the Steelers' win, either because their uniforms were so ugly that the Redskins couldn't look at them without wanting to puke, or because the stripes broke up the Steelers' visual appearance so that they were hard to see, hard to identify. What would stripes do to one's face?

The first stripe, down the center of my nose, was unremarkable; two more stripes made a part of my face seem to -- disappear. Viva stripes!

Over the course of the Halloweening hours, I had many compliments from kids about my face. The best compliment was from a toddler, who waddled up to me, pacifier in his mouth, and reached out to try to grab my stripes.

I've washed them off, ready for bedtime, but I dunno ... I think I like the look.

Lucky

This crawling piece of crap was not on any of my tomato plants, a circumstance for which I am truly grateful. 

Instead, it was on my experimental potato plant in a garbage can -- in the late spring, I'd put several sprouty russet potatoes in a garbage can, covered them with a few inches of dirt, and have been adding decorative bark to the growing stems.

It's a failed experiment -- the stems showed little or no interest in making tubers. I may have started the experiment too late for success. Perhaps I'll try again next year.

Odd that this hornworm chose the potatoes instead of the tomatoes, but I'm glad it did. My ire was much less. How I wished that I had a chicken to eat this bug! But since it was on a worthless potato project, I merely clipped off the stem and put it in the City garden stuff recycle bin, where it can be fertilizer for one of the many excellent City compost utilizations in the future.

Haha, hornworm, you lose.

Potatoes and Dog

For the last two days, we've been feasting on potatoes -- from our own garden.

As with many veggies, what comes out of our own ground is so far superior in taste than the stuff from the store that we have to wonder just what the heck producers do to their product to make their fruit so bland.

The ones in the picture are the last from the real seed potatoes planted in late spring. The trick seems to be catching the harvest at the exact right point: if the plants are in blossom, you can get tiny (but delicious) "new potatoes," but if you let the plants wither, the potatoes instantly start to re-sprout, and look a bit gnarly. We're still learning potatoes in California. Back East, we planted Kennebec potatoes in the spring, harvested them in late summer, and had enough to last us through most of the winter.

Learning is fun. I have a batch of bastard potatoes drying on the rack in the back yard -- I'm going to try for one more harvest this year, with store-bought potatoes that are shriveled and sprouting. Who knows?

And then there's the milestone of July 19th. Ten years ago on that date, I thought to myself in bemusement, "For my mother's birthday, I went out and bought myself a dog."

Howie was about four months old when I brought him home from Delta Humane Society. The night of July 19th, he slept beside me, tethered to my wrist on a leash. (I slept on the floor in the kitchen with him.)

Happy birthday, Mom, wherever you are. I miss the woman that you were in that all-too-short time when we were fishing buddies and mischief-makers. Thanks for teaching me how to pick and train a good dog. And you're welcome, for me teaching you how to grow Kennebecs.

Happy anniversary, Howie... best dog I've ever known.

One Potato, Two Potato

This morning Alex decided to re-dig her garden and plant turnip seeds.

The spot she was going to use was the site of potato failure this past spring. She got lush green plants, but they just kind of cooked in the summer sun, without blossoming. And if they didn't blossom and wither, they don't make potatoes, do they?

Wrong!

At least a couple of the plants made potatoes, because around the end of warm weather, some more green potato plants came up. The freezes last week turned them black, ahh, poor potatoes.

But when Alex began digging over there, well, what do you know? POTATOES!!! A couple of them look a bit gnarly, but those light-colored ones -- "new potatoes"  -- have skin so tender it rubs off with a thumb, and when freshly sliced, with a hint of salt, were THE best potatoes I have ever crunched down raw in my life. They were even better than the ones I raised back East, and that's saying a lot.

Now Alex has got her bearings with the potato growing. She has a plan.