Raccoon and Lobster

I saw this recipe on Steamy Kitchen a while ago and it was one of the main things that inspired me to buy a mandoline. The recipe itself is simple enough, but the presentation is gorgeous and sometimes food just tastes better with a little bit of flash. Not being one to leave well enough alone, I jazzed it up a little, the basic recipe is just potatoes, salt, and butter. I drizzled the potatoes with garlic-infused olive oil and layered in some slices of gruyère. Unfortunately, all that time in the oven caused the gruyère to separate, so next time I will be adding the cheese after it comes out of the oven. A light sprinkling of herbs would also be nice for future attempts. There are a lot of ways you can play with this recipe, and being such a big fan of potatoes, I will probably try them all eventually. Since you have to cut the potatoes into bricks before you slice them, you will also have ready made chunks for breakfast potatoes the next morning. Or mashed potatoes. Or potato salad. It’s twice the potato-y goodness.

Potato Dominoes adapated from Seven Fires: Grilling the Argentine Way

4 large baking potatoes
3-4 tablespoons olive oil
3 cloves garlic, smashed and chopped
salt
2-3 ounces gruyère cheese

Preheat your oven to 400°F. In a small bowl, combine the garlic and the olive oil and set aside. Trim the potatoes until you have a long rectangular box, roughly the size of a stick of butter. Using the mandoline, slice the sticks into thin cards, about 1/8 inch thick. Jaden at Steamy Kitchen sliced her potatoes a little thinner than that, and they look extra fancy. Toss the cards with salt and roughly stack them again into rows in a baking pan. Keep the stacks a little loose and leave them a little disheveled so they cook through and brown unevenly on the edges.

Drizzle the potatoes with the garlicky olive oil (I left the actual garlic out for presentation’s sake). When I made this, I sliced the cheese using the mandoline and buried the slices between sheets of potatoes. They blend in so perfectly they’re almost impossible to see but the effect was a little ruined by the cheese separating during the cooking. Far better, I think, to simply keep the slices and scatter them on top of the potatoes when they come out of the oven and form a cheesy layer on top of the crunchy browned edges.

Bake for about 40 minutes or until the edges are golden brown and the center is tender when jabbed with a skewer or fork. Serve immediately.