Two-Tone Oven Fries

Going on vacation always makes me a little insane. Leading up to departure it suddenly becomes very important to clean the apartment, even though we’re not going to be here for 10 days. As if petty thieves really care about pristine shower tiles that I scrubbed with a toothbrush and a fresh box of Arm & Hammer in the fridge.

Grocery shopping is off the table, making that fridge with the fresh box of Arm & Hammer the most insane part of the week before vacation. No, instead of grocery shopping I’ll just use up what I have.

And that’s how I ended up eating lightly buttered hamburger buns for breakfast this week. So you can imagine I wanted some real food to accompany the frozen chicken breasts stuffed with broccoli and “cheddar” we had slated for our last pre-vacation supper. The bag of frozen peas that has lived in the back of our freezer since the Pea Soup Disaster of ’08 last spring (that’s a whole other blog post) just wasn’t going to cut it, so I had Jeff do a market run and pick up some potatoes for oven fries.

We have a bag of fries described as “super” by their manufacturer in our freezer, but now that we’ve got these oven fries on our radar, they just don’t cut it.

Seriously, these fries take about seven minutes of extra effort and are about a million times better than anything that comes out of your freezer. You may as well just throw out whatever frozen fries you have right now. Once you make these you’ll have no need for them ever again.

I noticed that the book this came out of, Vegetarian Comfort Food, is a scant ninety-nine cents on chapters.indigo.ca. If you’re a vegetarian — I’m looking at you and you — this is a great book to have in your library.

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Two-Tone Oven Fries
Adapted from Vegetarian Comfort Food
Serves 4 or me and Jeff

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 large clove garlic, crushed
1 large sweet potato, peeled and cut into 1/4 x 3 inch pieces
3 medium potatoes, scrubbed and cut into 1/4 x 3 inch pieces

Method:

1. Preheat oven to 400F.

2. Combine the oil, chili powder, salt and garlic into a large bowl. As you cut the potatoes into fries gradually stir them into this mixture.

3. Spread fries out on a large cookie sheet in one layer. Make sure fries aren’t too crowded.

4. Bake for about 30 minutes, turning half way through. Use a sturdy spatula to loosen them and flip them over.

5. Serve with ketchup and mayo.