Cooking For Kohai – Super Easy Potatoes

Today I made some potatoes for Fox and me. Fox doesn’t like jacket potatoes, though, so I did a quick-and-dirty not-roast. Typically when I think of a recipe as ‘simple’ I think in terms of how many ingredients it takes, and how many different things do you have to do to prepare it?

So.

If you want a potato to eat and you want to be super easy, just clean it – wash any dirt off the outside – then stick it on a pan and stick that pan in the oven. You want it to go for about 40 minutes at 180 degrees, 160 if your oven is fan-forced. If you want to test it, get a toothpick and poke it in – and if the toothpick goes in easy, then the potato is cooked.

But if you don’t like jacket potatoes, if you want smaller pieces of potato (to maybe eat less potato, or to share it better), here are the extra steps.

  1. Peel the potatoes and cut them into chunks that are about the same size as one another.
  2. Lay out a piece of tinfoil about the size of a page of paper.
  3. Put the potato in the middle, and dribble a little bit of oil over it.
  4. Add salt and pepper if you want, but you don’t have to.
  5. Fold the tinfoil in half, then fold it over on each side, so it’s tight.

That’s it. You can stick that set of potatoes and the jacket potatoes in the oven alongside one another, and they will be fine. You can overcook them – even by another 40 minutes! – and they won’t burn. You can finish them before the rest of the meal is done, and you can just turn the oven off, and they’ll sit and hold their heat for some time.