Anger Burger

It’s a not-great photo of an even worse dinner, and yet, I’m showing it to you.

I have an entire tier of comfort foods made complicated by voluminous sub-categories, but somewhere in there is a good old-fashioned baked potato.

Now, I don’t believe that a baked potato is a side-dish to anything else, especially not a steak or – aesthetics forbid – a lobster.  It’s the most fucking dense conglomeration of carbs you can come by, and you want to serve it along side the protein glut of a filet mignon?  Oh hell no.  Steaks are for steaks – I’ll grant a few slices of fresh, buttery, garlicky bread and definitely suggest a clean-tasting salad of some kind for balance, but the baked potato gets its own damn pedestal.

I have only two recipes that call for the use of the insipid russet “baking” potato: a baked potato and stew.  For the stew I chop the potato up very fine in the hopes that it’ll totally disintegrate and add to the overall richness¹, while the baked potato should be self-explanatory.  Something about that big, dry flavorless heap that can only be made palatable by a half a stick of butter, finely shredded sharp cheddar, a pint of sour cream, salt, pepper and a liberal handful of green onions just makes me swoon with comfort.  I could be eating a pile of sand for all I care, it’s all a delivery system for fat and salt.  Hell, I can’t even be bothered to take a decent photo of it.

¹An easier way of doing this would be to use instant potato flakes, of which both the very cheap versions and the very expensive (organic hippy brands) have no other ingredients than potato.