POTATO INSIDE OUT

What’s so special about potato?


Potato is an important staple food and the number one vegetable crop in the world. Potatoes are available year-round as they are harvested somewhere every month of the year.

The potato belongs to the Solanaceae or nightshade family whose other members include tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and tomatillos. They are the swollen portion of the underground stem which is called a tuber and is designed to provide food for the green leafy portion of the plant. If allowed to flower and fruit, the potato plant will bear an inedible fruit resembling a tomato.

Although potato is a humble, lumpy, bland, familiar and unglamorous staple but I love cooking as well as eating it. It brings satiety and I love the fluffy taste of potato. Could be that is why potato is considered as comfort food.

What is it that such a humble little vegetable can make me so excited about?

A few weeks ago I learned a potato recipe from one of the Asian Food Channel programs named ‘Chef at Home’. This recipe makes potatoes that are crispy on the outside and fluffy in the inside. The name of the dish is Stuff Baked Potato. What I really like about Michael Smith (the Chef of this program) is that he encourages his viewers to improvise.

I really agree with what he said: “A recipe is merely words on paper; a guideline, a starting point from which to improvise. It cannot pretend to replace the practiced hand and telling glance of a watchful cook. For that reason feel free to stir your own ideas into this dish. When you cook it once, it becomes yours, so personalize it a bit. Add more of an ingredient you like or less of something you don’t like. Try substituting one ingredient for another. Remember words have no flavour, you have to add your own!”

Following what Michael Smith said, I tried the recipe, stirring down my own idea into this dish and …………love the result.

Here is my version and name of the dish - ‘Potato Inside Out ’

Ingredients

• 8 potatoes
• 4 slices of bacon, fry until crispy, cut into small pieces
• 4 green onions, sliced thinly
• 50 gram of Cheddar cheese, grated
• Salt and pepper

Method

• Steam the potatoes for around 45 minutes or until tender when pierced with a fork. Let them cool.
• Slice the top, lengthwise, off of each potato

• Scoop out the flesh

Note: the original recipe is to bake the potatoes before they are scooped instead of steam them. You may choose whichever you like. I prefer to steam coz it’s easier to scoop

• Add the grated cheese, fried bacon, green onion, salt and pepper to the potato flesh. Mash well and then stuff back into potato shells. You can even carve a face on this stuff potato as you can see on this picture

• Place on a baking pan and bake for 30 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and potatoes are heated through.

And these are the results……..so yummy

Who Moved My Cheese?

In December 2009, I had been busy with Project Moving. Just 2 days before Christmas on December 23rd, we moved from the old house in the Northeast to the new house in the Southeast of Jakarta. The reason we moved house simply because we want to avoid the flood which usually comes around end of January each year.

So far we have experienced 2 big floods (water entered the house up to 1 meter high) and 1 small flood (water entered the house up to 20 cm). After 3 flood experiences, it’s time for us to move. And so we moved to a new house which looks like Barbie house.

During the moving preparation, I organized our stuffs in different colors of plastic containers and I ended up having 65 containers which 40 of them contained books (in total we have around 800 books). Some of the books are my precious cooking books.

On the first day we were in the new house, we bought RTE (ready-to-eat) food for our lunch and dinner. We were all exhausted from the moving activities and slept well that night. The next morning, I did not feel like eating RTE food anymore so I decided to cook.

Alas, my kitchen has not been ready yet and most of cooking stuffs were still in the plastic containers. Though we put label on each of container but dealing with stacks of 65 containers were not that easy. I checked my refrigerator, found broccoli, onion, milk and some seasoning. I was thinking of making broccoli & cheese. I remember that I still have some Old Amsterdam Cheese which I bought in Amsterdam last October when I was there for a business meeting. I opened the compartment for keeping cheese & butter in the fridge but I only found the butter while the cheese was no where to find.

Hey who moved my cheese?

I checked with each member of my family in case they happened to keep the cheese somewhere else but nobody knew the cheese where-about. I kept on searching for the cheese coz how can I make broccoli and cheese without the cheese?

Here’s my recipe of Broccoli and Cheese

Main ingredient:
400 g broccoli, cut into small pieces, boil in water for 5 minutes

Cheese sauce
2 table-spoons butter
1 onion, chopped
2 table-spoons flour
250 ml milk
A pinch of ground nutmeg, salt & pepper
200 g cheddar cheese, grated and 2 tablespoons of parmesan cheese

To make the cheese sauce:
Melt the butter in a sauce-pan on medium heat
Stir fry the onion in the melted butter until wilted
Put the flour into the pan, stir well
Pour in the milk slowly while keep on stirring
Put in the salt, pepper and ground nutmeg
Put in the grated cheese, mix well

Arrange the broccoli in a glass dish which has been brush with butter or margarine
Pour in the cheese sauce on the broccoli, spread parmesan cheese on top of the sauce
Bake in the oven at 180 degree Celsius until brown