Baked Potatoes
Always be baking potatoes!
When your oven is on…
It’s a waste of energy to place only one tray of food in the oven. If the oven is on, there is no reason not to be baking some potatoes while you’re at it! Potatoes of all kinds can be baked, kept in the back of the fridge and utilised in a variety of interesting ways later in the week.
No need to peel any potato—just wash well.
💡In fact in order to reduce food waste, consider investing in a pair of vegetable scrubbing gloves; you really do not need to peel most of your veg, a good scrub will do the trick. It will be more nutrient and less wasteful.
Baked Potato ideas…
Loaded Skins
Cut baked potatoes into two.
Carefully scoop out most of the soft potato, leaving the skin intact.
Your potato skins are ready to be loaded.
Using a smidgen of water (or olive oil), cook some finely chopped leeks and garlic in a frying pan, add a touch of nutmeg. Cook until soften. Season to taste.Add this cooked mixture to your scooped out potatoes. Give it all a good mix.Add black or red pepper to taste. Load your potato skins with the leeky potato mixture.
💡Leave the tops mountainous—don’t smooth them out—so that the pointy bits can catch a little in the oven.
Put them under the grill or place them in the oven when you want to eat.
This is a good opportunity to use up what’s in the fridge. You don’t have to choose sauteed leeks. You can use absolutely anything and everything in your fridge to add to your crushed potatoes.
💡Outer leaves of cabbages, grated carrot, onion (any onion, red, pink, white, green, spring, leeks…), mushrooms (fresh/dried(combination), garlic… Spinach, kale, chard, any or all, lightly sauteed with onion and garlic if you like.
Again, load up your potato skins and you are ready to go.
Sautéed Potatoes
Roughly chop an onion and two garlic cloves, start cooking them in a frying pan with a little olive oil, add salt. (If you add salt now, the onions will release their juices and you will need less oil).
If you have some hot fresh chillies, go ahead and add them. As they are cooking, cut up a couple of your cooked baked potatoes and add them to the frying pan. Add a juicy tomato or two. In the summer, you can make this really tomatoey if you like.
Cook on medium/high heat. Season to taste. Turn heat off. Finish with whatever herbs you have around. Parsley, basil, coriander, dill, tarragon, sage, all will work.
Gnocchi with Spinach, Kale and Garlic
made with previously baked potatoes or sweet potatoes
Ingredients
- Cooked potatoes (or sweet potatoes)
- A little flour, nutmeg, salt, a lemon
- Spinach, kale and garlic
Method
Mash your potatoes well with a fork, add a little flour, a touch of nutmeg if you have it, and a pinch of salt bring it together until it resembles a rough dough.
This is our favourite thing to do with sweet potatoes. It’s messy business—there is no denying that, but it doesn’t have to be too complicated. Don’t over work the dough. Make long, thin snake shapes out of the dough and cut them as evenly as you can manage. Don’t make them too big, remember they will swell up when you cook them. This is not a competition. They can be wonky and odd looking. This is part of Home Cooking!
If you want to do extra work, you can mark each gnocchi morsel with your fork to give the distinctive gnocchi look—but you don’t have to.
Sprinkle with generous dusting of flour and freeze if not using immediately.
Cooking the gnocchi
Bring a wide pan of water to boil, add some salt.
Add a couple of handfuls of gnocchi into the pot, they will sink. When they rise up from the bottom and pop up, they are ready.
You can serve them with sautéed spinach, kale and garlic mixture.
Saute your kale and spinach with garlic, salt and pepper and add your cooked gnocchi to the frying pan, toss everything, zest and juice of a lemon and a generous pinch of nutritional yeast.
After you serve the gnocchi in your pasta bowls, you can drizzle with a touch of extra virgin olive oil. Buy the best extra virgin olive oil you can afford. Use it sparingly after you have cooked your dishes. That way you can enjoy the smell of the oil too.
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