A Potato for the Russet of Us

My wife and I like to watch programs that have a negative impact on your soul, like Dateline. That’s how I came up with the idea to dig a hole in the backyard using the shovel my wife keeps by my office door, fill it with a couple inches of water, take a whole bunch of Benadryl and stand in the hole waiting for a lightning storm. The idea’s a composite of a couple of Idaho-based episodes, both involving the wife murdering her husband, the difference being that in one of the episodes, the wife buries the body in the backyard, and in the other, she shoves him overboard into a lake after feeding him Benadryl on a cold, February morning, and leaves him there to drown. The beauty of my plan is simplicity, and since I am both plotter and victim, no murder is involved.

Not really what I want to do, but I take comfort having a plan in case things get really bad.

We also watch cooking shows, like Top Chef and America’s Culinary Cup. Those shows are more uplifting, with less of a focus on murder and more on not slicing your fingers off in the kitchen. Neither Penny nor I are especially fond of cooking. She enjoys watching them cook, and I enjoy comparing myself to people who know how. I think about the few things I’m competent at making, and what it would take to get from where I am to where I could be on one of those shows. I don’t think I’m even qualified to be in the audience. I can’t imagine how I would begin the journey, other than start life over and go to cooking school, but even then, that still might not be enough.

I decided a while back to concentrate on doing a few foods well, like hot chocolate and Thai iced coffee. BBQ, yes, as long as it’s simple. Mostly chicken and tritip, which don’t take too long. Hot and fast, not low and slow. If you’re into BBQ, you know what I mean.

The other thing I’ve gotten good at, though not good enough to make it to Top Chef, is potatoes. Roasted potatoes, specifically. I’ve been through several generations of improvement since I first started a few years ago. I used to only like red potatoes or Yukon Gold potatoes. Never russets, which technically are the Idaho Potato. That was before we lived here. Now that we’re here, I figured I better get with the russet, so I did. I read somewhere you should boil them first, and that helped. I won’t go through all the gyrations, but I eventually dropped boiling as unnecessarily complicating the process. Same for a five minute zap in the microwave. Extra steps no bueno.

A bit about the gear. A cast iron pan.

I slice my potatoes into quarters, partly because I like how they look, but also because these are not baked potatoes, for crying out loud. I season with garlic salt.

What about proper lubrication? Butter? Oil? Vegetable oil? Olive oil? I couldn’t decide, so I went with both butter and vegetable oil, but now that we’re talking about it, I realize I inadvertently switched back to olive oil, and lots of it. No big deal, the important point is that it’s both butter and oil, not one or the other. If you can’t decide on a thing, do both.

At a certain moment, not sure when, I decided to flip the potatoes halfway through the cook, to make the surface crispy. That seemed to work pretty well for a while, but then I noticed I was ending up with burnt potatoes. Instead of halfway through, I adjusted to about 85% of the way through, but they were still getting burnt.

Then it hit me. Crank up the heat to 425ºF instead of 350ºF. Go shorter. And don’t flip.

That’s where we are today. And it works. At least once.

I could look this up on the internet and settle on a repeatable formula that’s better than mine. Maybe that would land me on Top Chef, but let’s face it, nothing I am ever likely to do between now and when lightning strikes me in my shallow pit in the yard is going to be enough to get me past the initial rejection letter. I doubt I’ll even apply in the first place. Why should I? Until they launch a program for people like me, let’s call it Bottom Chef, I’ll just stick to the recipes I know.