Buttered Potatoes with Parsley

By Kath Dedon

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Homegrown Potatoes with Homegrown Parsley! 🙂

Potatoes! I love them in all forms. Maybe it’s because I’m 5/8 Irish (my great, great grandparents immigrated from Counties Clare and Cork during the Potato Famine), but I do love potatoes.

Last year, for the first time, we grew our own. It was so much fun digging our potatoes out of the ground and having them for dinner within an hour! We grew russets, Yukon Golds, and some kind of red potato. Our crop was quite successful.

This year Bob just planted Yukon Gold potatoes. He followed the same procedure as last year, and set up the sprinkler system so they would get watered while we were on vacation. When we came home, the plants looked terrible! They actually looked pretty dead, except for one.

I don’t know what happened, but I suspect it may have something to do with the crazy weather this summer. We’ve had foggy days in the 60s and then a couple of hot days, and then back to cooler weather.

Anyway, last night we decided to see if we could harvest some potatoes for dinner. Bob went out and got some, but he said he had to do a lot of digging to get the few that he found. This year we will not be having a great harvest of our potatoes.

We were surprised to have a few russet potatoes in the bunch that Bob dug up. Could they have come from last year’s crop?

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With fresh parsley in our garden, I decided to use Jacques Pepin’s recipe for Buttered Potatoes with Parsley from his Happy Cooking! cookbook. You wouldn’t think a recipe would be necessary for such a simple dish, but he does include a great tip: After you drain the potatoes, put the pan back on the stove over high heat for about 30 seconds. He says this creates potatoes with a creamier texture.

Chef Pepin also says to toss the potatoes with the butter and parsley gently so they don’t break up. Well, my potatoes had already broken up in the pot, so they have a “smashed potatoes” look about them. Not what Jacques Pepin had in mind, but they still tasted delicious!

This recipe works especially well with very small potatoes which are either left whole, or cut in half.

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My potatoes may not be beautiful, but they were a great treat from our garden!

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Buttered Potatoes with Parsley

(Adapted from Jacques Pepin’s recipe in Happy Cooking!)

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(print the recipe)

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Serves 4

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1½ pounds potatoes, cut into 2-inch pieces

1½ tablespoons unsalted butter

¼ teaspoon salt

3 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley

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1. Put the potatoes in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil; reduce heat, cover and simmer for 10 – 15 minutes. (Timing will depend on the size of your potatoes. Jacques’s recipe says 15 – 20 minutes, but my potatoes were falling apart before 15 minutes.)

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2. Drain the potatoes well. Put the pan back on the stove over high heat for about 30 seconds to dry the potatoes.

3. Gently toss with the butter, parsley, and salt.

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