Oh, right, It's 2011 now (also Poignantly Precarious Potatoes)

Happy 2011 everyone! It's a new year, which means I have a better chance of cooking more than two dishes before the next year rolls around :P. Anyways, my girlfriend wanted to make a fish soup for tonight's dinner and I was to make a salad (which I can happily say that I can make on my own now, thank you very much). But this dinner plan left us without any starch for the night. So instead of resorting to eating toast, we decided to cook something with our potatoes. After some snooping around on Tastespotting, we found some Hasselback Potato recipes. We took the main idea and ran with it, using our own ingredients that we had lying around. The distinguishing characteristic of Hasselback Potatoes is that they are sliced thinly down the length of the potato but without separating the slices, keeping the potato whole in a sense. We cut the potatoes in the basin of our cutting board so as not to slice all the way through the spuds.

The slices are important in that they allow our glaze/sauce-looking thing to be better absorbed into the potatoes. The final cut looks like this:

You should be able to see all of the thin slices we made in the potatoes. After this, we sliced some garlic cloves and fit each slice in between the slits. The next step was to prepare the sauce/glaze-looking thing. We used some butter (Smart Balance Light rather), canola oil, paprika, salt, pepper, and basil, melted it in the microwave, and spooned it onto the freshly cut spuds. If we had some sort of brush, that might have worked better, but you've got to work with what you have. Now all you need to do is bake them! 40-45 minutes at 450° (If you wish, you can choose to reglaze the potatoes in ten minute intervals during the baking process, especially if you have extra glaze left over. This should help keep the potatoes moist. We only reglazed once, at the 30 minute mark, mostly because I forgot about this step...). Here's our Hasselbacks after reglazing, but before the final bake:

After you're done, garnish your dish with some cilantro and voilà! We have Hasselback Potatoes!

I enjoyed eating these a lot. The slices create the bite sizes for you, so all you need is a fork and you are ready to go. I, for one, don't like eating baked potatoes all that much, so this was a much appreciated deviation from the normal path of starches to my stomach...no, not the pharynx then larynx then trachea, I mean.....oh nevermind.

And now the rating for today:

Time to cook: A little over an hour (~15 min to prepare and 45 min to bake)

Amount of help received: Barrels (again, I mostly observed, this time after my failed attempt to slice garlic)

Presentation (according to girlfriend): 4.5/5 (a little burnt, but it was pretty)

Tastiness (according to girlfriend): 3/5 (tastes like baked potato [potentially could have been avoided with more than 1 reglaze])

So I'm still very much a fledgling, not yet ready to take off, and I would surely break some bones if I tried at this point...but I'm learning valuable lessons each time. As long as I stay patient I'll be good. :D

Thanks peeps!

-Stuart-