Roasted Fingerling Potatoes with Fresh Herbs - Ode to a Tuber, Part 16!

Remember the scene from the movie Castaway when Tom Hanks is finally successful at making a fire on the uninhabited island and he yells with pride "Look what I have created!!"

That is exactly how I felt when I dug up my very first-ever crop of fingerling potatoes from my garden yesterday! This spring, I experimented with Russian Banana fingerling seed potatoes and grew only five plants in a very small area to see what would happen. From those five plants I was able to dig enough potatoes for several meals for my husband and myself.

I'm definitely not recommending you all go out and grow your own potatoes but I found it fun and rewarding. They are a pretty easy vegetable to grow except for mounding the soil over the plants a couple of times after the plants start to grow.

Researching which recipe to try first for my pride and joys resulted in a simple but tasty recipe by Tyler Florence. Fingerling potatoes are tossed with olive oil, fresh herbs, garlic, S&P and roasted in a very hot oven on a preheated baking pan.

The aroma in the kitchen was wonderful and the potatoes especially delicious. I think it was the recipe but it could have had something to do with growing them myself :)

Tyler's original recipe which can be found here didn't mention how to handle the herbs but I decided to remove the herb leaves from the stems and chiffonade the sage. The recipe also says to roast the garlic whole and unpeeled with the potatoes. Rather than removing the roasted garlic from the peels after roasting, I felt that would be easier to peel and chop the garlic cloves before roasting.

Roasted Fingerling Potatoes with Fresh Herbs
Recipe adapted from Tyler Florence
Printable Recipe

Serves 4

4 cups fingerling potatoes, scrubbed (try to choose potatoes of a similar size, cut large ones in half, if necessary)
2 sprigs fresh rosemary, leaves removed and chopped coarsely
5-6 leaves of fresh sage, cut into thin strips
5-6 sprigs of fresh thyme, leaves removed
6 cloves garlic, chopped coarsely or sliced thin
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus for sheet pan
Salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 500 degrees F and place a baking sheet with sides inside to heat.

Place potatoes, rosemary, sage, thyme, and garlic in a medium-sized bowl. Drizzle with about 1 tablespoon or so of olive oil, and season with salt and pepper. Toss with your hands to coat the potatoes with oil. Remove the hot baking pan from oven, lightly coat with olive oil, and pour potatoes onto pan. Place potatoes in oven and reduce heat to 425 degrees F. Roast for 20 minutes, or until crispy on outside and tender on inside. This may take a little longer depending on the size of your potatoes.

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