April 16, 2007: Indian-spiced potatoes

Recently, Lucy from Nourish Me inadvertantly posted a recipe that would transform our Eastern vegetarian burgers into Eastern vegetarian burgers and chips! These are chips of the self-saucing variety, moist with a paste of garlic, ginger and ghee and luridly yellow thanks to turmeric and yes, more ghee. If anything, these spuds were a bit too oily for my taste so next time I'll start with 2 tablespoons of the ghee and then up it to three if they look like they can soak up a bit more. Now that I've had 'em, I don't think I'll be making these burgers without 'em.

Indian-spiced potatoes

500g of waxy potatoes
salt
a thumb-sized piece of ginger
3 cloves garlic
1 teaspoon ground turmeric
4 tablespoons ghee (next time I'll use 2-3 tablespoons)
1 teaspoon fennel seeds

Scrub the potatoes, place in a saucepan, cover with cold water and add a pinch of salt. Bring the potatoes to the boil and then simmer them until tender. Drain, cool, and dice.

Peel and coarsely chop the ginger and garlic. Add them to a mortar with the turmeric and a teaspoon of salt, pound it all together into a paste. Lucy says you could use a food processor instead, and in that case you might need to add a few tablespoons of water too.

Warm the ghee in a frying pan and first add the fennel seeds. Let them sizzle and sputter for a few seconds before reducing the heat. Add the spice paste and stir-fry for a couple of minutes.

Next in go the diced potatoes - turn the heat up again and continually stir the potatoes for about 10 minutes as they cook. Hopefully they'll develop a bit of a crispy skin and your self-saucing chips are done!