Sunday, August 29, 2010

Roasted Lavender & Sage Fried Potatoes

Out of eggs this morning, so I wandered out to the garden to gather some spuds, onions, garlic & herbs for a mess of fried potatoes for breakfast. Pan-roasted lavender is the newest ingredient in my list and I wanted to experiment with it.

Empty pan
First you'll have to learn how to pan-roast lavender.

Start with an empty pan - no oil, no butter, nothing.

Essential Oil steaming away
Heat the pan up to medium high, not too hot or you'll burn the lavender. Add the lavender and stir it constantly. You'll see the oils steaming away. This will remove some of the sweeter, floral scent of the lavender and leave you with a rich, nutty lavender to use in your savory dishes.
Roasted lavender on left, our regular culinary lavender on right

Whole and Ground roasted lavender
You can see how the color has changed after the lavender has been roasted. After roasting the lavender we grind it up to let the flavor diffuse better into the potatoes. I don't like biting into a whole bud of lavender, it tends to be too intense and overwhelms the flavor of the dish.

Three kinds of potatoes and our onions make it colorful

Now you are ready to start with the rest of the ingredients.

We used three different kinds of potatoes that we grow: Yellow Finn, Pink Fingerling, and Blue. We grow our own onions and garlic, too. That's why I said I went out and gathered all those ingredients for breakfast.
Bergaarten Sage
Curly Leaf Parsley
Chopped Parsley
I gathered other herbs for this dish: sage, parsley and then garlic. All are chopped or sliced to add to the potatoes.

Chopped Sage
Sliced Garlic
Throw them in the pan with some salt and cook until some of the surfaces of the potatoes are brown. Serve with eggs and you have a fabulous herbal breakfast.


Ingredients:

1/4 C Olive Oil
6 potatoes
3 cloves of garlic
1 big or two medium onions
2 tsp ground roasted lavender
1 Tbsp fresh chopped sage
1 Tbsp fresh chopped parsley
Salt to taste
Potatoes ready to eat!






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