Cooking with your home grown new potatoes

When you grow your own fruit and vegetables you want to make the most of them when it comes to cooking and eating them.

Own grown fruit and vegetables have such a great flavour because they are so fresh; that when you prepare them for a meal I think it is best to use easy simple cooking methods to let the taste come through. This is true with your newly harvested potatoes, as i have said before it is best to only harvest enough to last until your next visit to the vegetable patch. New potatoes seem to taste at their best newly harvested and cooked.

I let the size of the new potato as well as the variety help me decide the cooking method I will use. I have Charlotte potatoes for use with salads. The Charlotte potato is one of the potato varieties with has a yellowy flesh which is often described as 'waxy' in texture. To me a 'waxy type' of potato is one that stays whole when cooked unlike a floury type which can start to fall apart and might even disintegrate if over cooked. Some potatoes go grey if left for a while after cooking, which is not good if you want to use them cold in a potato salad with mayonnaise, Charlotte potatoes stay a good colour.

My other variety is International Kidney, which is the type they grow on the island of Jersey and when grown there they are the famous and acclaimed Jersey Royals. They are harvested early in the year on the island because of the milder climate they have there, the taste is said to be special too, so that may be due to the soil of the island.

I am pleased with both my varieties of new potatoes and would like to grow them again next year.

The small potatoes that I harvest are used as boiled potatoes, the middle ones might be used for roast potatoes and the larger ones make delicious chips, which is an extravagant way to use new potatoes but at least I am not paying to buy them.  As I have mentioned before sometimes if I get potatoes too small to boil, I get a collection of them together and fry them whole instead of having chips, as it is a pity to waste them.

I have a new way with roast potatoes that i use occasionally, i saw it on a TV cookery programme and tried it. After you have boiled the potatoes for a short time, you drain them and give the pan a shake to 'roughen' the surface of the potato. Then you roast that potatoes as usual. The shake of the saucepan gives the potatoes a slightly different surface texture once they are roasted and served. BTW I know the TV chefs rave about goose fat for roasting potatoes but I just use sunflower oil or olive oil, making sure I do not over heat it (healthier).

More on ideas for cooking potatoes in a future post.

 Thanks for visiting and reading, I am up to fifty visitors here some days which is good for me as I rarely work to promote my fruit and vegetable growing journal/ blog.