Good Potatoes

While in Tasmania I began buying up as much street-side-honesty-box-produce as baggage allowance would allow, including a bag of Kennebec potatoes found on Bruny Island, hoping to reinvigorate my enjoyment of home cooking. That rude combination of busyness, laziness and UberEats has strangled it out of me. These good potatoes are the cure. I’m carefully navigating the stigma of “quaint” here because good food from the ground should never be revered for anything other than its deliciousness.

I had planned to simply boil and season these blessed spuds until I had a taste, then a google – realising with a chalky mouth these ‘tateys are known for their low moisture content, AKA the prized potato for chippies, they were additionally dispatched to the oven. It was a good dinner.

Some good potatoes which happen to be smashed and crispy with pickled onion
Some good potatoes
Yoghurt or shit-wog-labneh (give some supermarket yoghurt a quick squeezin’ through a chux)
Pickled onions (if you find a recipe online you should add at least 10000% more sugar afterwards – perhaps it’s my upbringing but I cannot handle utterly vinegary pickles which are saturating fancy jars with good typefaces, and as a result, casual online recipes).
Dill

Rearrange your luggage at the airport so you’re no longer 4kg over.

Once home, wash then boil the potatoes until tender, 15-20 minutes, then lay them on a baking tray, smash with the heel of your hand and drizzle generously with olive oil, salt and pepper. Depending on your oven, roast at 220C until gold-ish and crispy (mine sucks and took around 40 minutes).

Slap some yoghurt or labneh on your plate/bowl as if you were an asymmetrical loving chef hitting your peak in 2016. Lay down some crispy ‘tateys, then pickled onion, then dill. A little more salt, pepper and olive oil if you’d like. Eat the thing with pride because you (kinda) avoided the middleman that is the supermarket in the 21st Century. Cheers, Tassie.