Food Friday: Purple Viking Potatoes

(Full disclosure – this is a column from the Way Back Machine. I am traipsing around New England, soaking up the leaves and the cider and trying to recapture my mis-spent youth. A new column next week, I promise.)

Hurrah! Fall is upon us and I can stop whinging about the weather, and my hot kitchen, and can finally settle down to start preparing some warm and satisfying meals using seasonal and local ingredients. I am channeling homey, earthy Alice Waters this week.

All the vegetable stands look so inviting with their colorful piles of pumpkins and gourds and sweet potatoes and glossy purple heirloom tomatoes. I have picked up a couple of the glossy food magazines, and have considered the fact that they think we should be thinking about Thanksgiving. That is not one of my major concerns since we never vary an inch in what we put on the Thanksgiving table. We do not deviate from our ritual foods. Although we might have to consider these Rosemary Potatoes instead of the usual mashed which we concoct with buckets o’chicken broth and oodles of butter. This way, this is a dish which could be served to the pesky pescatarian.

The food challenge this week includes potatoes: Purple Viking (marbled purple and pink-skinned, white interior) or Yellow Finn (yellow skin and interior) and rosemary.

Rosemary Potatoes à la Alice Waters

4 servings

Ingredients

3-4 medium potatoes, peeled, cut into 1/2″-thick slices
2 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Fresh rosemary sprigs

Preparation

Preheat oven to 400°F. Toss potatoes with olive oil and season with salt and pepper. Scatter rosemary sprigs all over. Put potatoes on a rimmed cookie sheet or in a gratin dish and roast, stirring and turning occasionally once they begin to color, until browned here and there and tender throughout, about 30 minutes. Take care not to overcook, or they can toughen and dry out.

https://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2011/08/rosemary-potatoes

I read Emma Thompson’s new book, “The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit” this week, which is a delightful little trifle you must share with your younger friends. It is an authorized sequel to the original “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” written by Beatrix Potter. Peter ate his way to a new adventure, thanks to the McGregors’ picnic basket. He woke up in Scotland, where he was rescued and welcomed into the McBurney family burrow. Peter’s many Scottish cousins were competing in the annual highland games. Needless to say Peter got into mischief. While in Scotland he ate heartily of porridge, radishes, young turnips and this is what caught my eye, potato scones.

I have always thought that scones were sweet, biscuit-like treats for tea, schmeared with clotted cream and dripping with jam. Then I discovered dropped scones, which look like pancakes. And now I have stumbled onto potato scones, which are hearty breakfast fare. Even Martha has a recipe for potato scones – which I will have to try as a replacement for my famous Hash Blacks – the hash browns I attempt periodically, which never seem to emerge from the kitchen as beautifully as something Mrs. McBurney would have prepared for Peter Rabbit. (She also sent him home to his mother with a “fat little haggis”. I draw the culinary line there.)
https://www.scottishrecipes.co.uk/potato_scones_recipe.htm

https://www.marthastewart.com/874311/potato-scones

Radishes, turnips and onions are all in season. You could have a lovely highland Peter Rabbit feast yourself.

“What should he find by the greenhouse but an interesting basket smelling of onions?
He opened it and climbed in.
Inside, wrapped in brown paper, were some excellent sandwiches of cheese and pickle.
He ate them all.
It was cosy in the basket so he fell asleep.”
~Emma Thompson, “The Further Tale of Peter Rabbit”