Oven Roasted Garlic Potatoes

Sunday

Nov112012

Quiz time!

It's 70 degrees and sunny in mid-November in Pittsburgh. Do you:

A) Slave in the kitchen for an hour making a fantastic dinner.

B) Declare it a pizza night for the *mumble**mumble**3rd**mumble**mumble* ... not first night that week.

C) Throw something quick into the oven and go back outside because HELLO. 70 DEGREES. AND SUNNY.

If you picked C, you win. Everything. The entire world. Because THAT is how dinner is done when it's 70 degrees and sunny.

This is technically the recipe for Garlic Roasted Potatoes. However, I'm a big fan of throwing extra stuff in with the potatoes, in no small part because I have a kid who loves vegetables. Thou shalt always appease the short vegetable lover. So, when I make Garlic Roasted Potatoes, they usually end up looking like this.

Either way, they're super good and SUPER easy. We eat them as a side with Chik'n product, which means I spend all of maybe five minutes in the kitchen.

The biggest trick to the speed demon dinner is to buy little tiny "B" potatoes. They often come in a bag found in the dark recesses of potatoland at the grocery store. Sometimes they cost a little bit more per pound than their larger counterparts, but I consider those extra pennies time. There's no cutting necessary with the tiny potatoes so I can get out of the kitchen faster.

Faster is good.

And so are these potatoes.

Garlic Roasted Potatoes

2 pounds mini potatoes, cleaned
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
3 cloves minced garlic (approximately 1 tablespoon)

1. Preheat oven to 450 degrees.

2. Place all of the ingredients in a large oven-safe baking pan. Toss carefully to coat everything with the oil.

3. Cook for 30-45 minutes, or until the potatoes are soft and lightly roasted. Flip twice during the cooking time with a spatula to make sure they cook evenly.

If you want to add other vegetables to the mix, might I suggest celery (one stick, diced), onions (one small yellow onion, chopped), baby carrots (one handful), and some cherry tomatoes (one handful)? Pretty much anything works, but that's our favorite mix.