224. Roasted Potato Hash Recipe

I tried a new recipe today. I don’t usually like cooking potatoes, but I had an excess of them and I didn’t plan on eating red potatoes at every meal this week. I saw this recipe for roasted potato hash in last week’s New York Times magazine. I had most all of the ingredients at my house, so I thought I’d try it for dinner tonight.

Side note, cooking a big Sunday dinner is great. It takes up a lot of my day and it’s a good stress reliever before the rest of the week. I’ll also have a couple meals in the bag if I don’t end up eating everything while I’m cooking.

I got some very good, fresh bacon from my friend Joel. He’s a native Iowan, so he picked up a bunch on a recent trip to his homeland. I made some the previous day. It was very good stuff. First thing I realized was that I don’t have that great of kitchen knives, or else I dull them very quickly. I diced probably a dozen potatoes of various sizes, but they came out fairly consistent, so I guess that was good.

I’ve been roasting a lot of vegetables lately. They don’t always turn out great. Maybe I don’t leave them in the oven long enough. But I like doing that because it’s usually pretty easy cleanup. (I put aluminum foil over the baking sheet.)

The recipe called to cook the bacon in the oven first and then put the potato, pepper, and onion mixture on the same sheet and cook with the bacon grease. That’s some old school stuff. The roasting took a while, probably about an hour, but I had other stuff to do while it was cooking, so I didn’t mind the time.

I swayed from my normal strict adherence to the recipe. It called for sour cream, lime, and jalepenos in adobo sauce. I had things that were slightly like that: vanilla greek yogurt, lemon juice, and a fresh jalepeno (I think it was jalepeno) along with some siracha sauce. I just went for it because I wasn’t up for making a trip to the grocery store. I didn’t mind that it probably tasted different than what the plan called for originally.

After flipping the potatoes every 20 minutes for an hour, I added the bacon and shredded cheddar cheese. I added the yogurt/lemon/siracha sauce to the mixture and… it was really good. I think it’s pretty hard to screw something up with bacon, starch, and lots of grease. I ate two bowls of it and I barely had enough for another meal sometime this week. (Though my stomach is paying the price for all the greasy stuff.)

This was an excellent and easy recipe. Only after rereading the accompanying article I realized that the author intended for it to be riffed on. I think it might be good with some scrambled eggs for a breakfast dish. That’s for another time.