We’re in full-on summer here in NYC and it’s blatantly obvious lately. It’s almost-brutally hot every day and night, extra-humid every time there’s a quick thunderstorm, and everyone and their brother is always throwing a BBQ for any (or no) reason.

On Monday, to celebrate Independence Day, my friend Kimberly threw a BBQ in her backyard. She’s got one of the most impressive outdoor spaces I’ve seen yet in the city, big enough to fit 30 people! We ate everything from staples like hot dogs and burgers to totally-not-traditional rice balls, and it was all really really good. My contribution? This Fingerling Potato Salad from the July 2011 issue for Bon Appetit. Step-by-step photos and the recipe after the jump!

Every time I get the itch to make potato salad I look for a new recipe to try. Maybe one day I’ll settle on “my” potato salad, but that hasn’t happened yet, I’m still auditioning potential candidates!

Like almost every potato salad recipe, this one calls for boiling the potatoes first. In the instructions it actually says to cut the potatoes and then boil them, but I always boil them whole and cut them later so I didn’t even realize the recipe said to do otherwise. The reason I always boil them whole is because I’ve found that boiling sliced (or peeled) potatoes makes the potato take up a bunch of water and leads to a soggy finished product. I’m not sure if that’s really true or if it’s all in my head, but I’m planning to do a semi-scientific test in the near future to see if my gut is right on this one . . .

But anyway, back to the potato salad.

I set the potatoes to boil and moved on to the rest of the prep work:

How beautiful are these freshly-washed leeks? I love them! The picture kind of takes my breath away, and really makes me thankful for the natural sunlight in my new apartment. Looking at these leeks again is making me want to go out and get some more to roast.

But again, I digress . . . these leeks were quickly broken down:

And while the potatoes kept working on the back burner, I started toasting the mustard seeds:

When you’re toasting spices in a pan, it’s important to take them off the heat as soon as they get aromatic. For mustard seeds, which don’t really have much of a scent, take them off the minute you see/hear the first one pop. They’ll keep popping even after you’ve taken the pan off the heat!

After moving the oil and seeds into a bowl, I added more oil and started sauteing the leeks:

If I had more patience, I would have done the leeks in batches as my frying pan was not large enough to accommodate all of them without crowding them, which leads to steaming rather than sauteing . . . but I decided that it was good enough for this salad and tried not to feel lazy about it as I stirred the leeks and kept checking on the potatoes, which still weren’t done by this point.

Once the leeks were just-soft, I turned the heat off and turned to the dishes while I waited for the potatoes to be done. When they finally were, I drained them, waited a few minutes for them to cool off a bit, and then started to break them down:

The secret to cutting cooked potatoes is little-to-no downward pressure. If you push down with the knife, the skin will pop off and the potato won’t slice neatly. If you use your knife the way you would to slice fish, you’ll get a nice smooth cut on the potatoes. Wiping the knife off reguarly (just like you would if you were breaking down fish!) helps too.

In the end, you have a bowl full of cut up potatoes:

And then it’s just toss toss toss, season season season, and you’re done!

The resulting potato salad was subtly-flavored yet interesting. Because it has no mayo, it’s a much drier potato salad than is traditional. Feel free to up the mustard/vinegar amount at the end to make it more tangy if that’s what you prefer! To be honest, that’s what I prefer, but I kept it as-is for the sake of following the recipe the first time (I usually don’t change too much the first time I make a recipe, otherwise I can’t trust the result to tell me whether to try the recipe again or not!). As written, the recipe produces a mellow potato salad that most people will love. Everyone who tried it at the BBQ said they loved it!

Fingerling Potato Salad
Modified from Fingerling Potato Salad, Bon Appetit July 2011

• 3. pounds fingerling potatoes, washed & unpeeled
• 1 tbsp kosher salt
• 9 tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
• 2 tbsp mustard seeds
• 3 medium leeks (white and pale green parts only), halved lengthwise, cut crosswise into 1/4″ slices
• 1 tbsp (or more to taste) apple cider vinegar
• 1 tbsp Dijon mustard
• Freshly ground black pepper

Place potatoes in a large pot and cover with water, making sure there is enough water to cover the potatoes by a few inches. Add 1 tbsp salt and bring to a boil, then lower heat to medium and simmer until potatoes are cooked through. (You can test if they’re ready by spearing one with a fork, it should be easy to spear)

While potatoes are working, heat 3 tbsp oil in pan and toast mustard seeds over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until you hear the first one pop. Remove from heat and transfer oil/mustard mix to a bowl to wait.

Add 2 tbsp oil and leeks to the pan. Add salt and cook over medium heat until just softened, about 10 minutes.

When potatoes are ready, drain them and let them cool off a bit. Then using a sharp knife, cut them into pieces about 3/4″ in size.

To assemble salad:

Add remaining oil plus the vinegar, Dijon mustard, and 1 tbsp water to the mustard seed mixture and wisk to combine. Toss potatoes and olives in the dressing to coat. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve at room temperature.

Sometimes I feel like my body is literally craving cabs, and specifically potatoes. I’m sure I’m not the only one who’d addicted to cabs so I’m betting lots of you can relate to that feeling! When I came home last night and looked in my approaching-empty fridge and cabinets, I discovered that I didn’t have much to work with . . . except some potatoes and onions. Luckily that’s exactly what I felt like eating!

A quick search through my spice drawer reminded me that I still had some wonderful smoked spanish paprika in there and the result is what you see above. It was filling and delicious with its mix of sweet and spicy, with a bright tang from a bit of lime . . . I hope you’ll enjoy my Smoked Paprika Potato Hash, recipe below the jump!

When you start cooking the onions before everything else, you end up with a mildly sweet caramelized onion flavor in the final dish. Sometimes I don’t have the patience to let the onions get to that stage but when I do I’m always reminded of how worth it the wait is! Take my advice and wait it out, you’ll be glad you did.

If your onions still look like this:

It’s not ready yet.

But if they look like this:

Well, dig in!

Smoked Paprika Potato Hash
Serves two as a side dish

• 1 medium onion, sliced 1/4 inch thick along the grain
• 2 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 Yukon gold potato, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
• 1 tbsp Smoked Spanish Paprika
• Pinch of dried chipotle pepper (optional)
• Juice of 1 lime

Heat about 1 tbsp olive oil in a skilled over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the onions and garlic. Stirring often, let the onions and garlic sweat for about 5 minutes until fragrant.

Add the potatoes and spices. Raise heat to medium-high and cover pan. Cook for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally to redistribute potatoes so that they crisp up all-around. Add lime juice and then salt and pepper to taste. Cover again and continue cooking on medium-high heat until potatoes are done to your liking.

Proper meal idea: Serve with a poached egg on top for breakfast or as breakfast-for-dinner!

Anyone who knows me knows my passion for potatoes. If you know me a bit better you also know that roasting is my absolute favorite way to handle pretty much any ingredient. And that mushrooms are another of my favorite things to eat. So it should come as no surprise that I was inspired by the Roasted Potatoes and Lemon with Dill recipe in the current issue of Real Simple magazine . . . inspired to make it the second I saw it, but to add mushrooms into the mix to make a truly delicious and hearty side dish that takes practically no effort at all to complete.

The original recipe called for using new potatoes sliced in half, but all I had on hand were regular red-skinned potatoes, so I used those and just cut them up a bit more. Anytime I roast potatoes I like to have lots of potato surface area so that it has a chance to get that golden caramelized finish . . . the best thing about roasted potatoes is the contrast between the rich, chewy outside and the soft inside!

Slicing the lemon this way is the hardest thing about the recipe. If I hadn’t been making it with the idea of photographing it, I would have made my life easier by slicing off a chunk of one side to give me a flat surface on which to slice the lemon. But the gorgeous perfect circles won out over convenience so I sliced it the fancy way. See what I do for the blog? =)

When you have all the ingredients sliced up, you toss them with salt, pepper, and oil and spread them out nicely on a cookie sheet, then pop it in the oven.

It all comes out golden delicious:

And lining the tray with aluminum foil means the cleanup is minimal, too! Score!

Roasted Potatoes and Mushrooms with Lemon
Serves 2

• 2 red potatoes, washed and sliced into 1/2″ slices
• 1 pound baby bella mushrooms, sliced
• 1 lemon, sliced into thin slices
• Olive oil

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Toss all ingredients together in a bowl with some salt and fresh ground black pepper.

Spread on cookie sheet in single layer. Bake for 25 minutes, stirring once to cook evenly. Serve immediately.

Tip: If covering your cookie sheet with foil to speed up your cleaning, spread some olive oil on the aluminum before putting the food on it. That will ensure the potatoes/mushrooms don’t stick to the foil!

The current issue of Bon Appetit didn’t speak to me as much as most issues do, but the few recipes I immediately jumped on turned out to be some of the best I’ve tried recently. This Roasted Fingerling Potato Salad was simple to make and yielded a side dish with a real wow factor. Elevating a simple roasted potato to this level is amazing, but doing it with such an easy recipe is even better! My parents loved this potato dish and I’m sure you will too.

Part of what makes this dish visually appealing is slicing the potatoes down the middle the long way. Fingerling potatoes have such a nice shape to them and this type of cut showcases that really well. It’s also a bit unusual so it adds a bit of a wow factor with no effort at all. I also love that cutting them this way gives much more surface area to get a crispy golden roasted edge onto — that’s my favorite part of a roasted potato for sure!

Be sure to coat the cookie sheet with a decent amount of oil to prevent the potatoes from sticking to it. If you’re into a quick clean up (and I’ve never met anyone who isn’t), you can definitely line the cookie sheet with aluminum foil first and coat the foil with oil instead. Just don’t be stingy with the oil if you go that route, because having to peel aluminum foil that got stuck to your potatoes will definitely ruin your enjoyment of this dish.

Oh and the original recipe calls for adding crumbled hard-boiled eggs on top of the potatoes, which I chose to skip simply because I was out of eggs (I have no idea how that even happened). I think they sound like a lovely addition to this dish and will definitely include them the next time I make it. Which, given how much of this I ate last weekend, will probably be very, very soon!

Roasted Fingerling Potato Salad
Adapted from Bon Appetit June 2010

• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 1.5 lbs fingerling potatoes, halved lengthwise
• 2 scallions, thinly sliced
• 1/4 cup fresh Italian parsley leaves
• 1 tbsp apple cider vinegar
• 1 tbsp mustard (with or without grains, your preference)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Coat cookie sheet (or foil if using it) with oil.

Toss potatoes with 2 tbsp olive oil and salt and pepper. Lay potatoes out on cookie sheet cut side down in a single layer and roast for about 25 minutes, until cut side is nicely browned. Turn potatoes over and roast until tender, about 10 minutes longer. Adjust salt and pepper to taste.

For dressing: Whisk remaining ingredients together and season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve cold dressing over hot potatoes if eating immediately, or serve dressing on the side and let guests top potatoes themselves.

This time of year one of the most exciting seasonal items is the teeny tiny potatoes that start popping up in all the markets. The baby potatoes are so sweet and tasty that they don’t even need butter or anything to make them delicious . . . but of course some shallots, garlic, and lemon never hurt anything did they?! These potatoes are easy to make and they’re a great side dish for just about any protein.

This side dish could easily be made with onions (red onions would be really good) but I just love shallots so I chose to go with them. Tip for onions and shallots: To keep them from disintegrating during cooking, slice them lengthwise through the ends!

Baby Potatoes with Shallots and Lemon
Serves 2-4

• 1 pound baby potatoes (about 1-1.5″ in diameter)
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 2 large shallots, sliced
• 2 large garlic cloves, minced
• Juice from half a lemon

Set pot of heavily salted water to boil (water should taste like seawater), then add potatoes and boil until tender, approximately 10-15 minutes. Drain potatoes. In heavy skillet, heat oil over medium heat. Add shallots and garlic and cook until shallots are golden yellow. Then add the potatoes to skillet and saute potatoes for a few minutes. Turn heat to low and cover pan, letting potatoes brown for a few minutes. Add salt and pepper to taste. Just before serving, squeeze half a lemon over the potatoes to finish.

As you’ve probably noticed by now, I really love salads that can stand their ground as a complete dinner. When I saw this recipe for Skirt Steak and Horseradish Potato Salad in the August issue of Bon Appetit, I immediately added it to the must-try list (this issue’s must try post is coming shortly!). After all, what’s not to love? Skirt steak’s my favorite cut of meat and super-easy to cook, potatoes are my all-time-favorite food, and we’ll both take any excuse to eat more horseradish!

The best part of this salad? It was delicious and so easy was to put together.

First step in this recipe is making the horseradish dressing:

Every single time I make a fresh dressing for a salad I marvel at how much better made-from-scratch dressing is compared to bottled. We didn’t eat many salads growing up (Latin family = lots of rice and fried stuff, very little salad!) but when we did it was either dressed with just oil and vinegar or lemon, or we had dressing out of a bottle. Now don’t get me wrong, I like bottled dressing just fine and still eat it, but there is no comparing it to the fresh stuff. No matter which recipe I try, I’m continuously amazed at how good the dressing tastes!

Some dressings have been more successful than others, though. This particular dressing calls for a lot of shallots to be mixed in:

And I mean a lot. 2 cups worth!

I don’t know if my shallots were particularly spicy or what, but I used less than called for and it was still too much for us! Next time I’ll cut the shallot amount in half, which I think will be exactly right for us. This is one of the few recipes I’ve come across that actually gives a standard measurement for the amount of shallots, so I can’t even blame this problem on a non-standard measurement! Which you probably already know is one of my peeves when it comes to recipes . . .

Anyway after the dressing was mixed, the next thing I did was set the potatoes to steam:

While they steamed, I heated my grill pan with some oil and started the steaks:

If you sometimes cook meat on the stove top and don’t own one of these yet, run, don’t walk, to get one! The one I own is similar to this inexpensive grill pan from Calphalon, and it’s definitely a contender for one of my favorite cooking tools. I don’t use it that often since I don’t cook meat that much, but it’s totally worth it for the gorgeous way it cooks steaks.

Just look at those “grill” marks!

As you probably know the secret to getting nice marks like these is to not touch the meat. Just plop it down and let it sit there for 3-4 minutes, then flip it once and let it sit again for 3-4 minutes. It’s so hard to do this because you really want to peek and poke and prod. I know, I get it, I do too! But trust me, don’t do it. Be patient and wait to flip it, you’ll be glad you did!

After you take the steaks off the heat, you definitely need to let them rest. I think mine would have benefited from a slightly longer rest given how much came out of them when I sliced them up, but I was hungry! I think these rested for about 5 minutes before I cut them, but maybe it should have been more like 10 minutes.

During that 5 minute rest I quickly tossed the potatoes and tomatoes with the dressing:

It was at this point that I realized I hadn’t bought the snap peas called for in the recipe! By this point it was much too late to run out and buy them (remember, I was hungry!) so I decided to just do without. I think they really do add something both visually and nutritionally to this recipe though, so I definitely encourage you to include them if you try this!

We ate this salad with all the ingredients (well except for the watercress) still warm, and it was absolutely delicious. It’s a bit weird to think of a warm potato salad, but in this particular case I think it is better warm than it would have been cold or even at room temperature.

The classic combination of steak and horseradish was wonderful as always, and the creamy potatoes covered in dressing went with them perfectly. The nice juicy tomatoes were a great fresh counterpoint to the richness of everything else (as the peas would have been, too!). Like I said, the only thing I would change next time is the amount of shallots — we found them overwhelming and ended up picking around them after the first few bites!

You know how sometimes, when you’re flipping through a cooking magazine, you come across a recipe photo that just screams MAKE ME! to you? This salad was one of those recipes — sure, it sounded interesting enough. But the photo? The photo is what sold me on it. And I’m glad it did, because this Caesar Potato Salad from the June 2009 Bon Appetit was incredibly delicious and totally simple to make! And isn’t it gorgeous!?!

I knew that if I was going to make this salad, that I was going to do it with the variety of potatoes shown in the recipe photo. It took 3 supermarket trips to find purple potatoes, but I didn’t think that was excessive at all! After all I love going to the supermarket/farmers market (I get that from my dad!).

By the way: fellow New Yorkers, find purple potatoes in a mix at Trader Joe’s

I found these multicolored radishes at Fairway (stop #1 of the three-market-tour) and figured they were perfect for my multicolored salad. This picture doesn’t do them justice, the shades of pink were intense!

Slicing the potatoes and radishes shows their colors off even more:

Once everything is prepped, the potatoes and snap peas are steamed:

The dressing is whipped together:

And everything is tossed together:

The recipe says it can be eaten warm or cold . . . we couldn’t wait for it to cool off so we ate ours warm, and it was quite wonderful. Definitely enough as a light dinner, but much more interesting than a typical salad. The tanginess of the dressing and radishes goes really well with the starchy potatoes and crispy snap peas. I’ll definitely be making this dressing in the future for other dishes, too, it was really tasty and totally easy!

As I’ve mentioned in the past, I love potatoes. My father often jokes that there is no Irish in our heritage so he has no idea where the potato thing came from, but for as long as anyone can remember, I’ve always loved them. Fried, mashed, boiled, you name it, I love it. I even have fond memories of various potatoes growing up: The super old-school potatoes my Portuguese/French grandmother used to make, boiled in salt water and served with olive oil on top; the excellent french fries we used to fry at home (Latin people deep-fry at home fairly often, hard as it is to believe); the roasted-in-the-meat-juices potatoes my dad still makes; the homemade potato chips my uncle used to make and sell in flimsy plastic bags. I’ve never met a potato I didn’t like.

So when I saw this recipe for “Salt-Roasties” in The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, I knew I was going to have to try it. After all, if potatoes are my #1 favorite food, salt has to be my #1 favorite condiment! And if you’ve ever had under-salted potatoes, you know salt is an absolute requirement when making any potato dish, but potatoes cooked in salt? This was news to me!

The recipe actually calls for yellow-fleshed potatoes, but I had these baby reds on hand so I used what I had. You can definitely use any type of potato that is not too big, I don’t really think it makes a difference for this recipe.

The potatoes need to be far enough apart so that they’re completely surrounded by salt, but the bigger the cooking vessel, the more salt you need. I only had 10oz of rock salt on hand, so I used the smallest vessel that would fit the potatoes spaced out — it happened to be a frying pan, but it worked just fine because it was tall enough and the perfect size (you can do this if your pans have metal handles!). Once you have the potatoes layed out, you cover them in salt:

The recipe says to cover them to “just barely cover,” leaving a speck of each potato visible so you can easily find them later. I didn’t quite have enough salt to meet the recipe requirement, but I didn’t notice any effect in the potatoes:

After 30-40 minutes in the oven, you dig out the potatoes, scrape off the salt, and eat! They weren’t salty at all (except for the skins) and the inside was perfectly cooked. The texture is like a boiled potato, but without the sogginess that often goes along with boiling. Really a good potato dish that’s all about the potato!

And the best part? It’s super easy. This may be the easiest recipe I’ve ever made, actually!

Salt-Roasties, adapted from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook

• 1.5 pounds potatoes, about 2-inches in diameter
• Rock salt (I used 10 oz, you may need more)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Arrange potatoes in pan so that they are at least .5 inches apart from eachother. Pour salt on top to barely cover, leaving a bit of each potato exposed so you can easily find them later.

Bake potatoes until tender, about 30-40 minutes.  After removing from oven, wait a few minutes to dig out the potatoes. Wipe off the excess salt. Enjoy immediately.

I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it here before, but I’m a HUGE potato addict. French fries are literally my favorite food, and I pick entrees at restaurants based on whether or not they come with potatoes on the side. Unfortunately my forays into cooking potatoes at home have been relatively limited in relation to how much I LOVE them, in the past I’ve mostly stuck to home fries or baked potatoes when making them at home. Nothing beats a great baked potato with some butter and pepper, IMO!

A few weeks ago, during Passover, a friend who was “keeping” came over for dinner, and I had to scramble to make something presentable for him that didn’t break any of the rules. I ended up making Smitten Kitchen’s Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic and this potato side from Anne Burrell’s show. (aside: my SK fandom status is through the roof at this point, I only started watching Burrell’s show because Deb recommended it!!)

“Pommes Anne” is a pretty classic dish that I’d previously come across in The Joy of Cooking, it involves slicing potatoes and layering them in a frying pan, then cooking the cake in the oven. A mandolin is absolutely crucial for this recipe, as slicing thin slices of potatoes is a really big PITA without one. Anne recommends this Japanese model (Amazon link) on the show, but I have a generic white one I got at Target that works well enough. Had I seen the recommended model for sale I would have bought it, but I bought the cheapest one I found when I went out looking . . . and anyway Target isn’t the place to go for the Japanese model of anything, probably!

Anyway, this recipe is Anne Burrell’s version of the classic, which she calls Pommes Chef Anne (it makes sense that if you’re a chef and there’s a recipe with your name on it, you HAVE to make it!). It’s not hard to make but it does take a while to slice and lay out all those potato pieces nicely in the frying pan, so definitely set aside some time at the beginning when you decide to make this for yourself (and you totally should!). The ingredients list couldn’t be easier (aside from the mandolin!), just potatoes, olive oil, and some cheese! You definitely want to work as quickly as possible when you’re slicing and laying out the potatoes to keep them from turning brown — I found that the second time I made this dish I was significantly faster and more efficient at this point, so practice definitely helps in this case.

I found it nice that all the work is done up-front and then you stick it in the oven and forget about it while you finish dinner. It does require flipping half-way through, and that can definitely be nerve-wracking, but I didn’t have trouble with that step at all. It probably helps that I have no fear of burns though, because our guest who anxiously watched me do it seemed really amazed that it worked out so well!

The only other tip I have for you is to slice the potatoes as thinly as you can — I had a few that got through thicker and I used them anyway, and my cake split apart at that point because the potatoes didn’t stick together well at that point. Other than that, hop to it! It’s easy and delicious!