Roast Potato Substitutes

Brace yourselves.

There's a chance I might not be the best cook in the world. Wait, now, and hush the disbelieving gasps that have no doubt escaped you. I'm pretty good, granted, but I have my flaws. I'm impatient and I'm not great at following recipes, which is why my baking repertoire is particularly limited. On the other hand, I like to think I have turned these challenges into positive attributes (I do this a lot, *ahem* potential employers) by being pretty good at improvising.

I am all about taking basic ideas and changing them to suit what you like/what you've got/what's in the discount bin. This involves categorising food, by texture, flavour, type, etc, and making sure your substitutes are appropriate. For example, my mum used to make a lovely little dish made by mixing grated cheddar, chopped onion, and egg, and baking it until it puffed up. We just called it 'cheese and onion', but I can appreciate that the name doesn't give much away, and could potentially be misleading. Maybe 'Cheddar and onion bake'? I don't know. That's for history to decide. Anyway, when I started cooking for myself I figured that the basic cheese + flavour + egg bake formula could be adapted pretty broadly, and I regularly make a feta and thyme for a greek tiropita feel, or ricotta, nutmeg and spinach for a creamier, Italian-ish version.

What I'm saying is, don't feel like you have to be constrained by 'recipes', or 'tradition', or 'common sense', or 'for God's sake Bronwen don't be ridiculous'. Well who's ridiculous now, goddammit, I'll show you all.

This slightly overlong preamble is really just to try and explain why I did something that I wasn't sure was going to work, but it totally did work, and now I'm going to rub it in all your doubting faces.

OK, so the other day I was all set up to make a nice roast chicken for Sunday lunch. I had my chicken, I had my veg for the side, all I needed was some potatoes to roast as I was down to my last one. So out I popped for potatoes. Now you tell me this; if you were a supermarket, what sort of jim-crack, shady operation do you have to be running to be completely out of potatoes during peak shopping hours at the weekend? A question for another time, perhaps, but the upshot is I was in a pickle. Potatoes with a roast is pretty much non-negotiable. I could have gone the relatively short distance up the hill to another shop where I would undoubtedly have found potatoes, but the downsides were twofold. 1) It was up a hill, and 2) I honestly never thought of this option until just now. Instead, I started to do my super-speedy thinking-outside-the-box food-improvisation thing. You know when Sherlock goes into his daft mind-palace whatsit and he's got WordArt popping up in the air all over the place? It's basically exactly like that, except with pictures of starchy alternatives. And you know what is basically potatoes? Gnocchi.

I'll give you a minute here, because presumably I've just blown your mind. Gnocchi is a starchy dough made from mashed potatoes. Makes total sense.

I got a 500g packet of regular, cheap gnocchi, and just poured it in to roast next to the chicken, as well as some onions and carrots.

Call me Wile E. Coyote: Super Genius

It didn't turn out perfectly - some of the gnocchi absorbed too much of the meat juices and disintegrated slightly. But most of the bits around the edges were crispy, chickeny, chewy, and delicious.

While they may not be able to permanently take the place of roast potatoes, I definitely think I'll be using gnocchi whenever I'm cooking for a large number of people, as it saves a massive amount of prep time.

Patent pending, so if you do it you'll have to credit me.  It's only fair.