Finally, we’re harvesting our potatoes—Red Golds and French Fingerlings, too. Every morning Roy forks up a plant or two and we ooh and ah over the tubers that tumble off the roots. (The potatoes are Roy’s babies, so he gets to decide how many we pull up every day!) There are always a few that are only the size of marbles—I slip them in my pocket and roll them around in my fingers from time to time, as if they were lucky garden charms. The rest I weigh and portion into those cute little green berry baskets for the farm stand. Any extras I get to keep. And cook for dinner. Yum.
The other night I had a few of both kind left over, and they were all different sizes. So I cut them up into pieces about the same size so they’d cook at about the same rate. But instead of roasting them, I decided to cook them on the grill using a method I developed for Fine Cooking years ago.
Basically, it’s just cooking in a foil package (not a radical concept!), but the trick is to make a package of even thickness so that all the potatoes cook at about the same rate (see directions in the recipe below).
The big payoff here is that by putting the foil package over the direct heat of the grill, the potatoes get some great browning (and flavor) and cook through, too. I wrap the potatoes in three layers of foil so that they don’t burn, and I flip the potato package once during cooking so both sides have contact with the hot grill grates.