Lentil & Mushroom Soup with Roasted Potatoes

What do Brussels sprouts, potatoes, carrots, and mushrooms have in common? They were all in my pantry begging to be made into soup. The lentils looked lonely, too, so I threw them into the mix. Hearty soups are best made in the winter, after all, even if the term “winter” doesn’t seem to currently imply snow. (Glad I’m no longer a little kid in snow pants raring to go with my toboggan!)

It’s worth keeping a few soup essentials on hand in the chilly months: good-quality broth (my favorite is Pacific’s organic free-range chicken), onions, garlic, dried spices, maybe a few root vegetables like carrots and turnips. All of those make great backdrops for heartier elements like beans, lentils, whole grains, and meats. Stirring in some cream and cheese at the last minute is another simple way to transform a thin broth into a thick, rich soup.

For this batch, I opted to roast a few of the veggies and sautée the rest to create a variety of textures in the finished soup. You can go the roasting route, too, or you can stir in the potatoes and Brussels sprouts with the lentils and let them simmer to tenderness.

Lentil & Mushroom Soup with Roasted Potatoes
Makes 6 ample servings.

1 baking potato (Idaho), cut into 1″ cubes
About 10 Brussels sprouts, halved
2 small onions OR 1 medium yellow onion, chopped
8 oz. mushrooms, sliced
3 cloves garlic, chopped or slivered
4 cups/32 oz. chicken OR vegetable broth (if you go with chicken, opt for free-range)
1 T. dried Italian seasoning OR a total of 1 T. of rosemary, thyme, oregano, basil, and sage
1/2 cup brown lentils
1 carrot, diced

Preheat oven to 350F and line 2 baking sheets with parchment paper. Put the cubed potato in a large bowl, drizzle in a little extra-virgin olive oil, shake on a little salt and pepper, and toss well with your hands. Spread out onto one of the baking sheets. Put the Brussels sprouts in the bowl and repeat the same process (oil, salt, pepper, toss). Place cut side down on the other sheet.*

Roast for 20 minutes, then pull out the sprouts. Let the potatoes bake for another 15 minutes or until they’re golden brown and very dry to the touch. (That crispy dryness means they won’t get soggy in the soup!)*

While your veggies are roasting, make the soup. Begin by sautéeing onions in a dab of ghee/butter or a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil over medium heat for 5 minutes or until soft and translucent. Add mushrooms, reduce heat to medium-low, and continue to sautée for another 5 minutes or until mushrooms are shrunken and soft. Stir in garlic and continue to cook for another 3 minutes.

Pour in broth. Stir in spices, lentils, and carrot. Simmer over medium-low heat (reduce to low if the soup is bubble-boiling rather than ripple-simmering) for 20 minutes or until lentils have reached desired tenderness. By now, the potatoes should be done, so go ahead and stir in the roasted Brussels sprouts and potatoes. Season with a pinch or two of salt — taste as you go! — and serve. Leftover soup can be refrigerated for up to a week.

Note that soup will thicken upon standing. I like not-so-brothy soup, but if you’d rather have more broth, pour a little fresh broth into your next-day soup and mix well before reheating. Serve with grated or shaved Parmesan if you like.

Enjoy!

* If you’d rather skip the roasting, proceed directly to making the soup. When you add the lentils, set your timer for 10 minutes. Add the halved sprouts and the cubed potatoes at that point and simmer everything for a final 10 minutes.

Baked Potato "Cake"

If you have a bit of spare time and a sacrificial kitchen towel*, making a baked potato cake — which can be turned into the world’s tastiest hash browns if you have leftovers! — is a fun way to prepare potatoes. All you need is butter, salt and pepper, and baking/starchy potatoes. (As opposed to waxy potatoes, which aren’t quite starchy enough to do the job here, especially since we’re leaving the skins on.) It’s also quite helpful to have a oven-safe wire rack and a plate that will fit over the top of a 9″ skillet. You can bake the cake directly on a covered baking sheet rather than on a wire rack, but going the rack route will make for a crispier cake.

The flipping part is a little bit tricky, but just remember this: you can’t go wrong with potatoes and butter. Even if you wind up with a smashed cake rather than a flipped one, it’ll still taste delicious.

* I say “sacrificial” because the pigments/antioxidants in the potato will turn the towel black. It’s a fascinating process to watch, actually — when you first squeeze the grated potato in the towel, the towel acquires a brownish hue, but as the pigments oxidize, the brown becomes dark brown and finally almost black. Washing out the towel in running water will turn it grey. Potato-scented grey. So be sure to use a towel you don’t care about…or use one you’ve been wanting to make a potato-scented grey. I’ve designated my sacrificial towel as a potato-twisting towel and plan to re-use it accordingly.

Baked Potato “Cake”

Butter, preferably from grass-fed cows
1 baking potato (the Idaho variety generally works out to be 3/4 to 1 lb. per potato), scrubbed but not peeled
1 sacrificial kitchen towel
Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 425F. Cover a baking sheet with aluminum foil and top with a wire rack. If you’re going to put the cake directly on the sheet, cover it with parchment paper. Melt about 1 T. butter in a 9″ nonstick skillet over low heat.

Grate the potato with a cheese grater, piling the potato onto the sacrificial towel as you go. Wrap the grated potato securely into the center of the towel, then hold it above the sink and twist it as hard as you can. You should see plenty of juice trickle out. Scrape the grated potato into a large mixing bowl. Stir in melted butter and a generous helping of salt and pepper.

Melt another tablespoon of butter in the 9″ skillet. Add the potato, pressing down gently but firmly with a heat-proof spatula to smooth out your cake. Increase heat to medium-high and cook for 3 minutes or until the underside looks brown when you use the spatula to gently pull up a side so that you can peek underneath.

Take the skillet over to the counter and put a large plate on top of it. Invert the skillet quickly — but securely! — so that the cake drops onto the plate. Slide the cake back into the skillet, return to heat, and cook for another 3 minutes.

Slide the cake onto the wire rack/sheet and bake for 10 minutes. Remove and let cool for at least 5 minutes before shifting/cutting the cake. (The cake will harden into place as it cools.) If you used a rack, place a clean large plate over the cake and flip it over. If the cake sticks to the rack, use your fingers to gently press the cake down and away from the rack, poking your fingers into the space between the bars and gradually working the cake free from the rack. (Starch sticks; that’s why the cake sticks together to begin with.)

Serve immediately, either plain or topped. Yummy pairings include smoked salmon and whole-milk Greek yogurt with a dill garnish (a Russian approach) as well as black beans, corn, and Cheddar cheese (a Mexican approach). Leftover “slices” can be kept for up to 4 days in the fridge. Just sauté them in butter for a few minutes over medium heat, and you’ll have the most amazing hash browns you’ve ever tasted. Even die-hard fast food lovers would have to admit that your potatoes beat the heck outta those McDonald’s fries that people say they like so much.

Incidentally, ever looked at the ingredient list on those fries? Here it is, direct from the McD’s website: “Potatoes, vegetable oil (canola oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, natural beef flavor [wheat and milk derivatives]*, citric acid [preservative]), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (maintain color), salt. Prepared in vegetable oil (Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness). Dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent.” Note the hydrogenated oil (a.k.a. trans fat) and wheat and milk derivatives.

All your potatoes have is potatoes (with skins!), butter, salt, and pepper.

Enjoy!

Potatoes with Basil & Anchovy

As long as you’re not planning on stuffing them, when you go for potatoes, give the smallest ones a try. They have a higher skin-to-inner-flesh ratio than the big boys do (which gives them a nutritional edge), they cook much faster thanks to their diminutive stature, and all you have to do to make them bite-size is cut them in half. And since they fit so easily into the palm of your hand, cleaning them is a snap: just wash and scrub your hands well with a potato or two between them.

Once you have your little taters prepped and ready to go, you can roast them, boil them, slice and sautée them, grate them…the list goes on and on. I like to boil a batch of them for 10 minutes, stick whatever I don’t immediately use into the refrigerator, and then sautée the precooked potatoes for various dishes as I see fit. In this case, I cut the boiled potatoes into slices before sautéeing them and tossing them with extra-flavorful ingredients like anchovy paste and fresh basil. If you boil your potatoes before you sautée them, you’ll get nicely browned potatoes that are evenly cooked through; if you jump right to the sautéeing part and skip the boiling step, you’re more likely to burn the cut surfaces and undercook the centers.

Potatoes with Basil & Anchovy

6 small potatoes, boiled for 10 minutes and drained
3 cloves garlic, chopped
4 medium tomatoes (yellow, green, or red), chopped
1 tsp. anchovy paste
Juice from one-quarter of a lemon
About 8 large fresh basil leaves, cut into strips (or more if you’re a basil fanatic — I went slightly nuts on my portion)
Sprinkling of red pepper flakes
Dash of sea salt

Cut potatoes into 1/2″-thick slices. Heat extra-virgin olive oil in a large skillet over medium heat for 1 minute. Place potato slices on skillet, pushing each one to the edges as you put it down so that you’ll have room to add more. Try not to overlap the potato slices — that nice golden brown happens when the surface of the potato is resting flat on the surface of the oiled pan. Sautée, uncovered and occasionally shaking the pan, for a good 10 minutes or until the bottoms of the potatoes are golden brown. Flip each slice and continue to cook for another 10 minutes or until both sides are equally golden brown. Add a little more oil to the pan and toss in the garlic. Cook, shifting both the garlic and the potatoes occasionally, for another 3 minutes or until garlic is softened and fragrant.

Slide the potatoes and garlic into a large mixing bowl and toss well with remaining ingredients, adding the pepper and salt to taste. (Remember that the anchovy paste will be salty.) Serve immediately. Cut basil turns black fairly quickly, so this doesn’t make the most eye-catching leftovers. If you’d like to keep some around for the next day, top each portion with the basil instead of tossing it into the mix; non-basiled leftover potatoes will keep for 4 days in the fridge. This would be a great side to serve with sautéed trout, walleye, or any other light-flavored fish.

Enjoy!

Garden Corn & Tomatoes with Curried Sunflower Seeds

You know what’s great about all the specialty cuisines nowadays? By “specialty,” I mean those that cater to niche — but growing! — interests like vegan, raw, gluten-free, etc. Everyone can sample these cuisines and ideas and benefit from them no matter what our personal food philosophies are. Take raw food, for example. Raw food chefs are incredibly inventive and tasty (if you don’t believe me, try a raw cake made of macadamia nuts and spices and raw cocoa some time) and I’m seeing more markets and restaurants offering raw dishes and desserts.

One of my recent favorite specialty-cuisine finds is Kaia Foods. They make fabulous raw kale chips by dehydrating the kale (or you can make your own by baking the kale with this recipe), and they also make darned delicious spiced sprouted seed mixes and granolas. All of their products are raw and fantastically crunchy to boot. Their foods are typically sold as snacks, but I’ve found that they make great additions and garnishes to main dishes. The sprouted seeds I used in this recipe are so delightfully spicy that they flavor the entire dish. Or if you don’t have any Kaia seeds on hand, you could accomplish a similar effect with curry powder and sunflower seeds.

Garden Corn & Tomatoes with Curried Sunflower Seeds

Fresh market corn (figure on one ear per person)
Garden tomatoes (figure on one or two large tomatoes per person), chopped
Thinly sliced red onion
Kaia Sweet Curry sunflower seeds OR roasted sunflower seeds + a sprinkling of curry powder to taste + a dash of tamari*/soy sauce + a drizzle of honey

Get a very large pot of water boiling while you shuck the corn. (The ears need to fit into the pot, so you might want to eyeball the proportions before filling the pot halfway with water and bringing it to a boil.) When the water is boiling, place the ears in the pot and boil them for 3 minutes. Promptly pull them out with tongs and allow them to cool enough to handle.

Hold the ears above a large bowl at an obtuse angle (more than 90 degrees) and use a sharp knife to free the kernels from the cob, gripping the ear at one end and starting to cut the kernels halfway down the ear. Flip over and repeat with the remaining kernels.

Add the tomatoes and sunflower seeds to the cut-off kernels and toss well to make sure that a good amount of the spices come off the seeds and go onto the other ingredients. (The tomato juice will speed that process along.) If you’re not using the Kaia seeds, you might want to whisk together the tamari, honey, and curry powder before tossing them in with the veggies. You could add more veggies if you want — great candidates would be cooked potatoes or green beans or cauliflower. Or you could add whole-grain pasta or whole grains themselves. (Corn kernels are whole grains, by the way.) Sautéed chicken or shrimp would be another welcome addition. Garnish with parsley if you like.

Enjoy!

* Make sure to use wheat-free tamari if you want to make a gluten-free dish.

Feta Florentine Omelette with Potato Tortilla Cakes

Although popular conception would have you believe that the vaunted Mediterranean diet mostly consists of olive oil and vegetables, in reality, it also involves a lot of pastured eggs and dairy. What self-respecting Greek would be without her feta cheese? Or halloumi or kasseri? Then there’s the whole extra-thick, double-strained yogurt that has caught on like wildfire in the States. And what about egg-drop lemon soup? Yet another Greek classic.

Note that the key word here is “pastured.” If you’re living in the Greek countryside, you probably have access to sheep and/or goat milk and all the assorted delicious dairy products that go along with that lush milk. (And the sheep and goats most likely spend their days chomping away at grass and flowers and shrubs and whatever vegetation they can get their hooves on.) You probably also have eggs from hens clucking about and pecking for bugs while they avoid getting stepped on by a goat or a sheep.

Wild greens are another staple of Mediterranean diets and one that we tend to be sorely lacking. From dandelion greens to sorrel to arugula, if you can forage it, it’s going to end up on your plate. Many of our unwanted lawn weeds are actually tasty edible greens. (Young spring greens are tender and mild enough to eat outright; older, more bitter greens are best when lightly cooked.) A great way to save money and boost your health is to NOT spray your lawn: eat your weeds, don’t douse them with chemicals!

In homage to the Mediterranean way of eating, I came up with an easy dish that combines some of my favorite things I love most about Mediterranean food: eggs, cheese, and greens. The potato tortillas made for a nice side dish. In an Irish-Mexican kind of way.

Feta Florentine Omelette with Potato Tortilla Cakes
Assume 1 or 2 eggs and 1/4 pound potatoes per person. How much cheese and greens you use is completely up to you and your taste buds. I like a lot of both!

For the cakes:
Yukon Golds, redskins. or any other small, waxy potato, skins left on and potatoes chopped into bite-sized pieces
Sea salt
Masa harina (a corn flour used to make tortillas; Bob’s Red Mill sells a very tasty whole-grain masa harina)
Butter from pastured cows (Kerrygold and Organic Valley are great choices; Kerrygold is my favorite)

For the omelettes:
Eggs, preferably from pastured hens
Feta, preferably made of sheep or goat milk (which are more likely to come from pastured animals than domestic cow’s-milk Feta is)
Assorted greens (dandelion, arugula, baby spinach, sorrel, whatever you like)
Butter from pastured cows

To make the cakes, simmer potatoes in a pot half-filled with water for 10 minutes. Drain well. Mash potatoes with a pinch of salt until smooth, then add enough masa harina to make a dough that’s stiff enough to shape into cakes but not so dry that it crumbles and falls apart. Shape into balls (start with just enough dough to be able to close your fist around it) and then press into cakes about 4″ in diameter. Heat a dab of butter in a large skillet over medium-low heat until sizzling. Cook cakes in batches, flipping them over after about 3 minutes or when cake has turned a golden brown. Add more butter when the cakes start to stick to the pan.

To make the omelettes, whisk eggs in a bowl until well blended. Hand-crumble the Feta and stir that in. Stir in the greens. Heat another dab of butter in a large skillet over medium-low heat until butter is sizzling. Pour in egg mixture and cook, every minute or so gently stirring the eggs with a heatproof spatula to scramble them, for 4 minutes or until they’re cooked through (i.e., not runny) but are still soft.

Serve your Mediterranean omelette alongside your Irish-Mexican cakes. Enjoy!

Roasted Potato & Eggplant with Bacon

Yesterday, I raided my garden and pantry for what turned out to be one of the tastiest and easiest dishes I’ve made in a while. It was all the more stunningly easy because of its main flavor: bacon. Yep. Completely non-messy, completely crispy, completely delicious. If you start with bacon from pastured hogs (which has a naturally lower fat content — and, by the way, that fat is mostly monoUNsaturated fat — and is not injected with spray-out-of-the-pan-inducing brine the way commercial bacon is), all you need is a wire rack, a baking sheet, and an oven to make perfectly crispy and light bacon. Hands-off bacon, that is! Couldn’t be simpler.

Besides, if you’re going to turn on the oven to roast some veggies, you might as well slip a tray of bacon onto the third rack. Then you can go outside and relax on the front porch while your meal makes itself. Just remember to bring a timer outside with you! Good-quality, lean bacon is too good to burn.

Roasted Potato & Eggplant with Bacon
Serves 2 for lunch

4 strips of bacon, preferably from Applegate Farms or another company selling bacon from pastured hogs
8 to 10 smallish finger-shape potatoes (I used purple fingerlings)
Extra-virgin olive oil
Sea salt & freshly cracked pepper
2 small eggplants (the fresher, the better; eggplants get bitter as they age), top stem removed
Chives, snipped with kitchen shears or minced

Preheat oven to 375F and make sure you have three racks ready to accommodate your baking sheets. Line two baking sheets with parchment paper. Line another sheet or tray with aluminum foil and set a wire rack on top of the foil.

Lay the bacon strips out over the wire rack, spacing them equally apart. Cut the potatoes into quarters or wedges and pile them onto a baking sheet. Drizzle them with oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper, then toss them well and spread them out on the sheet. Cut the eggplant in half and then into rounds (they’ll look like half moons). Drizzle them with oil and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Toss and spread them out on the other baking sheet.

Bake bacon, potatoes, and eggplant for 15 minutes. Check to see if the eggplant is golden brown and shriveled — it probably will be. Pull out the eggplant and let the potatoes and bacon continue to bake for another 10 minutes. The potatoes will be golden brown and crispy on the edges when done; the bacon will be sizzling and dark brown (but not blackening!). Note: if you use conventional bacon, you’ll have to cover it with foil to prevent the fat from erupting in your oven and making a mess. Stick with pastured bacon, and you’ll have amazingly crisp and delicious bacon with nary a drop spilled.

Let potatoes and bacon cool for a few minutes, then toss potatoes with eggplant and chives. Crumble bacon and scatter it over the veggies. Serve immediately.

Enjoy!

Potato-Cabbage Chowder

When I was a kid, I couldn’t stand cabbage — it tasted like old shoes and smelled even worse when it was cooking. But lately I’ve started using cabbage in my dishes, and I’m realizing that the whole trick to enjoying cabbage is to cook it gently. When you do, it retains its pleasing crunch and lightly sweet flavor, making it a welcome addition to stir-frys, soups, even textured sauces. And since cabbage is a cool-weather crop, it’s a great seasonal ingredient to have on hand in the winter months.

And let’s not forget uncooked cabbage, either! Thinly sliced raw cabbage is the basis of coleslaw: just add extra-virgin olive oil, apple cider vinegar, shredded carrots, and thinly sliced onion. Raw cabbage works well when mixed in most greens-based salads, actually, and sometimes you’ll even see raw cabbage featured in freshly pressed juice blends. The big plus of using cabbage raw vs. cooked is that its high vitamin C content won’t have been destroyed by heat.

Potato-Cabbage Chowder with Spinach & Catfish

1 medium onion, chopped
8 stalks celery, chopped
1/2 head of green cabbage, sliced thin
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 cup vegetable broth
1 cup water
3 cups whole milk, preferably from pastured cows
Pinch sea salt
3 medium unpeeled yellow or white potatoes, cut into 1″ cubes
Handful of curly spinach
1 T. dried sage
Cooked mild fish such as catfish or trout (optional)*

Either put a pat of butter or ghee into a large soup pot. Add onion, celery, and cabbage and cook over medium heat for about 5 minutes or until onion is starting to become translucent. Add garlic and cook for another 2 minutes. Pour in broth, water, milk, and sea salt and increase heat to high.

When the soup comes to a boil, add potatoes, spinach, and sage. Reduce heat to medium-low and simmer for 10 minutes or until potatoes have reached desired tenderness. Serve immediately, topping individual servings with fish before serving if desired. (By not adding the fish directly to the soup, any leftover soup will last longer than it otherwise would.)

Enjoy!

* I happened to have leftover cooked catfish on hand, but you can prepare a thin filet of fish such as catfish or trout while the soup is simmering. Just put a pat of butter or ghee in a large skillet, then cook fish over medium heat for 4 to 5 minutes per side, starting with the skin side up. When you can flake the center of the fish cleanly with a fork, the fish is cooked through. You may wish to remove the skin before serving.  To do that, just slide a standard dinner knife gently along the skin to loosen it from the flesh.

Note that thicker filets may take longer than 5 minutes. Also remember that the second half of the cook time — after you’ve flipped the fish — generally happens more quickly than the first, so you may wind up cooking the fish for 5 minutes on Side 1 and then only 3 or 4 minutes on Side 2. The fork-flake technique is a sure way to tell if your fish is ready.

Homemade Potato Chips

Move over, Frito-Lay! And Better Made and Ruffles and any other potato chip you might find on the shelf. Not even high-end organic chips can compete with the kind you can make in your home oven. The ones that come in a bag can’t beat out the homemade variety in terms of taste or freshness or nutritional quality, especially not if you use organic potatoes and extra-virgin olive oil. Seeing as farmer’s markets are offering plenty of potatoes and other root vegetables at this time of year, now’s the best time to get your chip on! (Warning: after you’ve found out how easy it is to make your own — cheaper, too — you might never want bagged chips again!)

Homemade Potato Chips

Firm potatoes, such as new potatoes or Yukon Golds, preferably organic (how many potatoes you use depends on how many pans you have available for baking and how many chips you want — figure on about 1 pound of potatoes per baking sheet)
Extra-virgin olive oil OR unrefined peanut oil
Fine OR semi-coarse sea salt

Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and set aside.

Using a very sharp knife or a mandolin slicer, slice the rinsed (but unpeeled!) potatoes as thinly as you can. Try to cut them all the same thickness so they’ll bake evenly.

Lay the potato slices out on the baking sheet; if you can, don’t overlap them. Use a pastry brush to brush the top of each slice with oil. Sprinkle each with sea salt, then bake for 20 minutes or until chips are nicely browned. How long you bake them/how brown you let them get is up to you — the more brown they are, the more crispy they’ll be, but some people don’t like that browned, almost-burnt flavor.

Remove chips from oven and let cool for a few minutes before starting in on them. If there’s a lot of oil around the chips (which there shouldn’t be since you brushed them rather than drizzled or dunked them), transfer the chips from the baking tray to a folded paper towel and let them drain.  At this point, you could also sprinkle on some dried herbs — dill is particularly good with potatoes — or grind on some fresh peppercorns.  Adding those elements at the last minute will sidestep the possibility of them getting unpleasantly burnt in the oven.

Enjoy! (Trust me, you will!)

Dilled Bacon, Potatoes & Tomatoes

Bacon.  Potatoes.  Sublimity.

Those were the guiding principles behind a recent bacon-infused dinner.  After cooking my two strips of bacon, I knew I was going to have plenty of tasty bacon grease happily burbling away in the pan.  Why throw that out when you can cook something in it…say, something that would absorb that luscious rendered bacon fat and make the most of it?  Besides, the deal had been (unwittingly) sealed earlier that day — or at least set into motion — when I’d gone to the farmer’s market and had stumbled upon small, rounded, oh-so-cute organic potatoes at one of the stands.  Those unassuming earthy jewels would be the ideal partner for my bacon drippings!  And the golden cherry tomatoes that I’d later find in my garden literally made the deal even sweeter.

Dilled Bacon, Potato & Tomato Mélange

Serves 2 as a light main dish; recipe can easily be doubled or tripled according to your needs.

4 strips good-quality bacon (Applegate Farms makes a nice one, or better yet visit your farmer’s market to find local and pastured hog products)
About 8 small round potatoes, sliced into 1/4″-thick rounds
12 cherry tomatoes, halved
Pinch of sea salt
Sprig of fresh dill, 1 or 2 tsp. of the ferny fronds torn off (the main sprig will be used as garnish)

Get the bacon cooking over medium heat in a covered saucepan. If your bacon is more of the val-pak variety, you might want to use a deep-bottomed pot to ward off bacon grease splatters. (See the Summer Bacon Pasta post to learn more about what distinguishes great bacon from val-pak bacon.) The bacon will probably take about 10 minutes to cook, but may take more or less depending on what kind of pan you have and what kind of bacon you have. Carefully turn the strips over with long tongs at about the halfway point.

When the bacon is crispy and brown, lift it out of the pan and place it on a folded paper towel to drain. Remove the pan from the heat and let it cool for a minute before adding the sliced potatoes to the bacon grease. (If you add them right away, the still-very-hot grease will begin to splatter.  Dangerously.) Cook the potatoes over medium-LOW heat for about 3 minutes or until the bottoms are golden. Flip them over and cook for another 2 minutes or until they’re just beginning to turn golden.

Add tomatoes and cook for another 2 minutes or until the tomatoes just start to shrivel. Sprinkle a dash of sea salt over the potatoes and tomatoes. Remove the pan from the heat and stir in lettuce and dill. (The residual heat will wilt the lettuce.)

Split the dish into two portions, plate, and crumble 2 strips of the cooked bacon over each portion. Add additional pinch of salt if desired and garnish each plate with large fronds torn from the remaining sprig of dill.

Enjoy!

In the case of rice, short-grain and long-grain varieties both contain two kinds of starch, but it’s the ratio of the starches that make the rice react to heat differently. The type of starch in long-grain doesn’t reach its popping point until about 200 degrees F; the short-grain starch will burst (become sticky) at 165 degrees F. That means that long-grained is more suitable for dishes where you want the grains to remain separate: pilafs, rice salads, as simple side dishes tossed with a bit of oil and spices.  (Examples:  jasmine, basmati.) Short-grain is better for sushi, rice pudding, paella and stir frys.  (Examples:  Spanish, pearl.)  Arborio rice occupies a peculiar middle position and is used for making risotto, an Italian dish wherein the grains are slowly simmered with liquid (trickling it in as you go) and served with Parmesan cheese. The final product is a rice that’s starchy enough to thicken its own sauce but is still crunchy inside.

Potatoes also come in three basic varieties: high-starch, medium-starch, and low-starch. The trade-off for high starch is low moisture, which means that the end result is a fluffy, dry potato, one that’s easy to mash and stuff. (Their high absorption rate also means, however, that they’ll fall apart when you boil them, so don’t use these for potato salads and other situations requiring a solid, still-shaped-like-a-potato cooked potato.) The opposite high-moisture, low-starch potatoes hold their form well and are wonderful used in baked gratins and soups and stews calling for potato chunks. Medium-starch potatoes are the all-purpose variety and are especially suited for roasting. It might be easier to remember that high-starch potatoes are sometimes called “baking potatoes” since they’re better prepared that way, and low-starch varieties are known as “boiling potatoes” since they’re stovetop-friendly.

Some common examples:
Baking potatoes:  Russets (Idaho)–brown, thick, flavorful skins
Boiling potatoes: Fingerlings–long, slender, with thin skins; these taste like butter all on their own
Yukon Golds–roundish and pale brown, thin-skinned and with a yellow flesh
Redskins–round and pink, with thin skins and a slightly peppery flavor
All-purpose potatoes:  White potatoes–round and/or Russet-shaped potatoes, medium-thick skins
Purple potatoes–you can’t beat these for sheer exotic appeal, especially in pureés!

Happy cooking!