No Small Potatoes By Mary Ann Fitzmorris
Don't you just love potatoes? I'm sorry. I meant to say "bad old white potatoes. A giant baked potato loaded with butter and bacon and scallions and chives, and even sour cream!
I've made it known I'm not a gourmet, so I can admit with impunity thinking potato skins a thing of beauty. Dipped in sour cream, of course.
Red potatoes are another matter. Maybe it was all the canned ones I ate as a kid. I've always cast a jaundiced eye at them. Sniffed down in condescension. They are second-tier tubers, in my opinion.
I bought a bag of them a week ago, entertaining a fantasy that we would roast the second rib roast stuffed in the freezer from Christmas, along with some carrots. ("Eat more carrots!" I always tell myself, but my self never listens.)
Faced with the trauma of pitching the lowly potatoes, I cut them into quarters, coarsely chopped about five large cloves of garlic, and a big handful of fresh parsley.
It was then that I remembered our once robust hedge rosemary hedge. It's now strangled by ferns, leaving behind sad rosemary twiglets. I'm sorry. I have enough dependents. If a plant can't stay alive on it's own without my nurturing it, I can't feel bad at its fate. (But I do.)
The rosemary was around so long I don't even remember planting it. At one time it was so robust our friends would come grab some for their roast fowl. Then we all forgot about it, leaving a few needles amidst a pile of bare branches. (Okay, I do feel really bad about this.)
So I was happy to remember it for these potatoes. I grabbed the twiglets and sheared them, sprinkling them on the potatoes.
I tossed them in a half stick of melted butter and a quarter cup of olive oil.
All this went into a shallow baking dish with a very generous sprinkling of sea salt (really starting to like that stuff) and coarsely ground black pepper.
I broiled these at 400, basting every time needles on top turned brownish and the interiors were really soft. Like, overcooked, though don't feel obliged to follow my lead if your veggie tastes tend to be more al dente.
Maybe not sublime, but pretty darned perfecto!
Roasted Red Potatoes
1 bag red potatoes, skin on
5 cloves coarsely chopped garlic
1/2 cup chopped parsley
6 Tbs. fresh rosemary needles
1/2 stick butter, melted
1/4 cup olive oil
Sea salt and cracked black pepper to taste
1. Wash and quarter potatoes.
2. Melt butter in a preheating oven.
3. Chop garlic and parsley.
4. Add oil to melted butter, then add all ingredients except sea salt. Toss potatoes in this mixture, coating evenly. Add more oil if needed.
5. Place in baking dish and sprinkle with sea salt.
Place in oven to broil, constantly basting. When done, potatoes should be soft and crusty at the same time, and coated in the garlic oil.
Serves six to eight.
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Saturday, January 27, 2018. At the last minute yesterday the radio station called to tell me that because the athletic events of the weekend have turned around, I would be needed to host a three-hour Food Show on WWL this noon. I'm always happy to be there, because it's my main source of new listeners. WWL's audience is so robust that I feel the effects of my having been there for days afterwards.
The conversations on this Saturday gig come together without my even trying really hard. As is usually the case, the matter brought up by the callers have very little connection with one another. This is something new in the talk radio trade. Very few topics get far off the ground. Fortunately, the calls that do come in contain enough meat to make them interesting.
Before it all begins, I have breakfast at the Fat Spoon, where I haven't eaten in awhile. I ask for a scrambler, made of soft-scrambled eggs (my spec), topped with hollandaise (a little too thick), with three slices of bacon underneath and a waffle on the side. I ask for maple syrup and they bring me what looks like the usual fake with maple. I have complained about this before. But this time they come back and say that it is indeed real maple syrup, served in the usual pitcher. I don't know if my past gripes made that happen, but I'm happy to see it. Ask everywhere you breakfast whether the syrup is real maple.
MA and I meet our friends the Fowlers for dinner. They go back many years with us, because of connections involving our sons and daughters. In a real oddity, we ran into them after Hurricane Katrina in the Washington D.C. Area. We were evacuated, but they had been moved by a corporate move. And then we all came back to the New Orleans area again.
It's Michael's idea for us to dine at Nuvolari's. We all say we like it, but we go there relatively rarely. I'm glad we do tonight, first for the goodness of the food, secondly for what struck me as a substantial menu change since I last was at Nuvolari's. The emphasis, which through most of its years was a mix of Creole and Italian dishes, is now almost entirely Italian, and in imaginative ways.
I start with what I thought was an appetizer of fried oysters atop fettuccine carbonara. That was really too rich for the enormous portion size, and I could only get about half of it down. Here was an ideal example of the eat-just half aspect of my weight loss program.
While most of the others are working on large slabs of lasagna, I have an entree that is, ironically, on the light side. It's a small plate of scallops of nice size, free from grit, seared perfectly, with a buttery sauce. Delicious.
I persuade the Fowlers to let me select a wine. It's a Viognier from California. In days passed, I would always tell the story of the origins of Viognier, a white wine indigenous to the Burgundy-Beaujolais part of the wine world. Nobody gives a damn about that sort of commentary anymore.
