Recipe 2.1 -- Orangette's Rustic Hasselback Potatoes

This didn't turn out nearly as well as I hoped it would, though it was still totally edible. Simple roast potatoes would have been easier and at least as tasty. But it was a good effort, and one thing I need to work on to combat the cucinaphobia is giving my technique a workout.

Ingredients:

Medium-to-biggish potatoes. I used red ones, bigger than those little baby ones but probably not as big as necessary. I made 4, for 2 people. I got them at the greenmarket, which means yay, eating local rocks!

Olive oil, copious amounts of

Something yummy to stick into the crevices. I used garlic, green onion, and bay leaves. The garlic and green onion were really difficult to get in there, though, so halfway through I gave up and just did bay leaves. You could obviously use just about any herb or aromatic you can get in there.

The Rest Of The Recipe

Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Wash and de-grunge-ify your potatoes, but don't peel them. Place a potato inside a wooden spoon and cut slits into the potato short-ways from one end of the potato to the other. As if to make the potato fan out. The wooden spoon should prevent your knife from going too far and just slicing the potatoes, but be careful because this didn't work that well for me.

Slide your herbs and/or aromatics into the slits. If you use bay leaves, put one whole leaf into a center slit. This was the really hard part for me, possibly because my potatoes were just too small.

Place potatoes on a cookie sheet and slather liberally with olive oil. Try to get some of the oil down into the crevices.

Put in the oven for 45 minutes to an hour, just like making baked potatoes.

Courtesy of Orangette