Happy Earth Day!

Recipe

Pommes Anna

Pommes Anna (Potatoes Anna) is a traditional French dish consisting of thinly sliced potatoes layered and cooked in lots of butter. Sounds good, doesn't it? Potatoes...butter...YUM. Fortunately, Cooking Light, one of my favorite recipe sources, found a way to lighten up this classic dish using less butter and making it much more figure-friendly without compromising flavor - this is a recipe I can definitely get behind. It's also a good excuse to use my cast iron Dutch oven (which is one of my favorite items in my kitchen), because it's a stovetop-to-oven recipe. If you don't have an oven-proof skillet or Dutch oven, I imagine you could transfer the melted butter to a covered casserole dish with similar results. These potatoes are perfect - light, buttery, and quite pretty to serve. They also reheat well, so they make great leftovers, and potatoes are such a versatile side dish - they go with almost anything. Typically, the layered slices should produce a single potato wreath that you can just flip right out of the pan..as you can see from the photo, I haven't quite perfected that technique yet! I'm happy to keep practicing though, since these potatoes taste wonderful regardless of what shape they come in.

Have a wonderful Earth Day, everyone - I hope we can all find ways to celebrate that honor our planet. For my part, I picked up some reusable shopping bags at the grocery store last weekend - no more "paper or plastic?" for us! To check out Earth Day events in your area, you can find a national round-up of activities at Envirolink.