Roasted potatoes with a tasty twist
I pull the ketchup out of the fridge.
“Don’t,” my boyfriend says. “You won’t need that.”
I pop one of the potatoes he’s just made into my mouth. It’s perfect: crispy and salty, with dreamlike, fluffy insides.
“We call them roasties,” says Rik, who learned the recipe from his mother back in England.
One very long hour after they went into the oven, they were ready, a meal on their own, with no other dish needed, except for maybe a bottle of wine.
How could I not marry him after that? Having someone cook for you is an aphrodisiac, even more so when that someone spends over an hour making potatoes.
We usually went to the grocery store as a team on Sunday, then made the roasties that evening, a treat to get us through the terrible reality that Monday morning was a breath away.
I was always up for them, but one night somewhere in that first year of marriage when we were adjusting to life as a married couple, Rik didn’t feel like doing the work. I stepped in.
I checked in on my batch every 20 minutes, babysitting them until all sides were evenly brown. I became so good at making them that Rik stopped.
“Brilliant!” he said each time, trying to guess what I had changed.
Sometimes, I chopped up garlic and threw it in toward the end, or dusted them with fresh rosemary.
I never stopped making roasties, not even when our marriage fell into trouble. The ritual was comforting. I couldn’t repair our relationship, but I knew how to fix roasties.
If they weren’t crispy enough, I tossed them back in the oven and cranked up the heat. If they came out dry, there wasn’t enough olive oil in the pan — whoops!
For anything else, I just sprinkled them with more salt.
The day I moved out, I left behind my mahogany bed and our martini shaker, but I made off with that old pan, perfect for making roasties. It made the sadness more bearable.
From one apartment to the next, I carried the recipe in my mind, taking my potatoes to potlucks.
“Where’d you get the recipe?” people asked.
Revealing the secrets about my short-lived my marriage was somehow a lot easier while sharing roasties. I always left with the feeling that maybe the incredible recipe Rik and I shared was enough.
I wasn’t looking forward to dating in my 30s, but in my new life, my roasties became an incredible wingman.
I started up a long-distance romance with an Irishman and texted him enticing photos of my roast potatoes, assuming if anyone could appreciate a good potato, it would be the Irish.
“Are you having a party?” he replied.
He couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that the pan, overflowing with potatoes, was entirely for me. I make roasties now on my own.
Each potato still gets examined as if I am a gemologist assessing a diamond.
I know that all the work I’m about to do will absolutely be worth it in the end.
And though the recipe might have come out of my marriage, I love that it finally feels like it’s mine.
This recipe has the best of both worlds — a potato with dreamlike, fluffy insides and rough, crispy skins.
In the unlikely event you have leftovers, the potatoes are just as good the next morning from the fridge.