Daz in the Kitchen: Herby potatoes baked with tomatoes, olives and feta

Monday, January 19, 2015

Herby potatoes baked with tomatoes, olives and feta

Firstly, I would like to apologise for the long time between posts. I have no excuse except that life is happening. I'll make an effort to be more regular but I am not making any promises. Now onto the post ... I hope you like potatoes!

Right now, we have a lot of potatoes in stock. We went to the store for some potatoes about a week ago and instead of our usual 2kg bag which would last us a couple of weeks, we ended up getting a 4kg bag as they were out of the 2kg. That's double what we normally get and we're struggling to get through it.

Last night, I decided that we needed to make a potato dish (instead of just mash as a regular accompaniment to a meal) to use up some potatoes.

I remembered that at one point The Boy went a little potato crazy and thought he would be cooking up a lot of potatoes, so he picked up a few cookbooks on the topic. I went through our collection and found this little treasure and had a quick look through it.

I knew I wanted something with potatoes as the main ingredient, rather than as a side ingredient and found this recipe. It looked and sounded tasty (and let's face it, I liked the pretty picture in the book) and found I had most of the ingredients needs to make it.

Here's the recipe for the potatoes:

Ingredients:

675g potatoes

1 tablespoon butter

3 tablespoons olive oil, plus extra for drizzling

4 cloves of garlic, chopped

2 red onions, quartered and sliced

1 - 2 teaspooons cumin seeds

1 - 2 teaspoons chili flakes

2 teaspoons dried oregano

2 teaspoons sugar

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

400g can diced tomatoes

12 - 16 black olives

115g feta cheese, crumbled

salt and pepper to taste

lemon wedges to serve

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 200°C. Cook potatoes in a pot of boiling water for 15 - 20 minutes until just tender. Drain and refresh in cold water. Peel and cut the potatoes into thick slices or bite size wedges.

Heat butter and olive oil in a heavy pan, add garlic and onions and cook until soft. Add cumin seeds, chili flakes and most of the oregano, and then add sugar, vinegar and tomatoes. Season generously with salt and pepper.

Put the sliced potatoes and olives into a baking dish and spoon over tomato mixture. Crumble feta cheese generously over the top and sprinkle with remaining oregano. Generously drizzle with olive oil, then bake in oven for 25 - 30 minutes.

Serve hot, straight from the oven with lemon wedges to squeeze over the potatoes. Serve with a fresh green salad.

I didn't use any butter, but then, I seldom do. When a recipe calls for butter, I often use olive oil instead, which is what I did here.

Instead of boiling the potatoes whole to pre-cook them, I actually sliced them first, because I figured they would be easier to slice raw, rather than boiling hot and soft from cooking. I also didn't peel the potatoes as I find that leaving the skin (thoroughly washed!) on provides some structure to the potatoes and they are less likely to disintegrate.

This dish turned out super yummy and very hearty. It was fantastic as a main dish but I think it would work well as a side dish to a lovely beef or pork roast as well.

I did, however, forget to serve it with a wedge of lemon, but even without the lemon the potatoes were yummy!