#51 New Recipes: Hasselback Potatoes

 I love potatoes. They're one of my favorite foods, and I'm always happy to find new ways to do them. These looked new and interesting, but at the same time very similar to a regular old baked potato.

Ingredients:
5-6 medium baking potatoes
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 tbspn olive oil
2 tbspn butter
coarse salt
black pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 425. Put the potato on a cutting board, flat side down. Start from one end of the potato, cut almost all the way through making thin slices.

This was the biggest pain in the ass. It was really hard to cut most of the way through the potato without cutting all the way through. There are twice as many slices as it looks because the potato didn't want to split apart much while it was still raw. I might have been able to get them to spread a little better if I'd cut down further, but after ruining several potatoes by accidentally cutting all the way through, I wasn't going to risk that.

2. Arrange the potatoes on a baking sheet and sprinkle garlic in between the slits. Scatter some butter on top of each potato - it doesn't have to be exact. Drizzle olive oil and sprinkle some salt and pepper over the potatoes.

3. Bake the potatoes for about 1 hour or until the potatoes turn crispy and the flesh is soft.

 So the various potato slices spread apart while they were baking. Eating them was slightly different from eating a baked potato, it was more like eating potato chips with a soft center.

This minor difference was not worth the 30 minutes it took me to slice these potatoes to look like this. I would have rather just sliced all the way through and made some chips. These stupid things took way too long what was was, basically, a baked potato. Or, oven baked potato chips. Either one of which would've taken half the preparation time.

Never again.