Recipe: potatoes with sundried tomatoes and stilton
November 9th, 2009 by IonaI can cook quite well. If you ask me to rustle up a dinner for three with salad and dessert, I can do it. But – I cannot follow recipes. At all. Everything I have ever cooked was made up on the spot, or a variation on something I’ve previously made up on the spot. In the interests of the latter, this is what I had for dinner tonight.
Ingredients:
-three large baking potatoes, elderly, sprouting;
-one red onion;
-generic tomato sauce – the kind that comes in a jar, or one tin chopped tomatoes drained well and mixed with passata;
-peppered ham (or ordinary thick ham, and add black pepper to the finished product);
-stilton;
-niceish olive oil;
-sundried tomato paste.
Preheat oven to 180 degrees Centigrade. Peel and chop the potatoes into thin slices, and toss into boiling water for five or ten minutes until softened (I forgot to do this, and regretted it). Drain, and put in a flattish ovenproof dish. Pour over tomato sauce, stir until potatoes are covered, add sundried tomato paste to taste and a splash of olive oil. Stick into oven for twenty minutes.
In the meantime, chop the onion into small bits and tear up the ham roughly, mix them together. Take the dish out, and (carefully! – I burned my fingers, as usual) stir them into the mixture so they’re also covered in tomato gloop. Put in the oven for another twenty minutes, go away and do some hoovering.
Crumble enough stilton to cover the top of the dish. After the twenty minutes are up, make a layer of it on the top of the potatoes, and put it back in the oven. After five minutes or ten minutes or however long it takes for the cheese to brown and bubble and sink, you’re done. Serve with green salad, it’s nice. And freeze the rest, if you’re only cooking for one, it’s perfectly defrostable.
I like it – but next time I think maybe more sundried tomato paste, and maybe I’ll stretch to cooked bacon rather than ham.
