KITCHEN ADVENTURE: FRY COOK. I can make french fries at home!!! ph34r my l33t sk1llz!!!

Okay, first I will give the recipe I was working from; then I will tell you what actually happened. Real-life cooking never replicates what happens in the books with the glossy pictures. I think you will do best to follow the recipe but keep my problems/modifications in mind, and adjust flexibly and quickly when things seem not to be following the plan.

recipe (from a Food & Wine cookbook): Oven Fries with Garlic and Parsley. Four servings. Active: 30 mins, total: 1 hr 15 mins.

2 lbs baking potatoes, scrubbed and cut into 1/3-inch-wide fries; 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil; salt; 2 large garlic cloves, minced; 1 tbsp finely chopped parsley; freshly ground pepper

1. Preheat the oven to 475. Prepare a large bowl of ice water. Add the potatoes and let soak for 15 mins. Drain well and pat dry.

2. In a large bowl, toss the potatoes with the olive oil and season with salt. Spread the potatoes on a large nonstick rimmed baking sheet in a single layer. Bake for about 20 mins, or until the potatoes are golden on the bottom. Turn and bake for about 25 mins longer, turning occasionally, until golden and crisp. Transfer the fries to a platter, sprinkle with the garlic, parsley and pepper and serve at once.

what really happened: I am bored by this talk of garlic and parsley. Og want fries!!! …Also, my freezer doesn’t work so good.

So instead of using ice water, I put a bowl of tap water in the fridge for a half-hour. Yeah. Then I soaked the cut-up potato (just one potato) in the water, still in the fridge, for the requisite 15 minutes. I did everything else according to the recipe (using proportionally less olive oil, of course, and interpreting “rimmed baking sheet” to mean “baking tray covered in aluminum foil”), until the first 20 minutes of baking had passed. Then I opened the oven door to turn the fries.

That’s when the smoke alarm went off.

Heh. It turns out that for whatever reason–maybe the lack of ice water, maybe the foil, maybe something extra-hot in the apartment (could it be… me?)–the fries were already pretty much done. I don’t own a “platter,” so I put ’em in a bowl, sprinkled more salt, and macked them like it was my job. (…Only with more enthusiasm.)

They were so good. One fry was burnt and inedible (I assume that’s the tattletale who tripped the alarm); one fry was very slightly undercooked. The rest were pretty much perfect, even though they had been cooked for less than half the recommended time.

So basically–be flexible, check your fries, keep your windows open… and be a confident cook! I always thought fries were kind of exotic and awesome, the sort of thing for which you needed decades of steeping in the esoteric secrets of Better Homes & Gardens–and in the end, they were super easy, quick, and delicious. And really, is anything in the grocery store cheaper than the humble brown potato? Highly recommended.