Sauteed new potatoes

New potatoes are the best simply boiled, right? Right - but cook twice as many and sauté the leftovers on the following day, with spinach and capers.

Potatoes are king of Sunday roast

It is a fact that at a full roast dinner table people will devour unbelievable quantities of roast potatoes. You can hardly cook the required quantities if, like me, you have only one, smallish, single oven which cooks contentedly only one thing at a time.

Sunday lunches for more than six, the Christmas dinner – a nightmare. Spuds and the roast veg in the oven and they all scream ‘leave me on my own here!’

Roast potatoes or grilled potatoes?

I’ve discovered that you can cheat. Cheated roast potatoes are cooked under the grill. The carrots and parsnips happy in the oven, full blast, while the roasting joint is resting and I sneakily slide the preboiled, almost cooked potatoes onto the grill pan and crispen them there, only tossing every now and then.

The beauty of this approach is that a/ you can present them as roasties, and they taste really almost as good as, and b/ that you can surreptitiously throw another batch in while people are busy hoovering up the first.

Sautéed potatoes!

Sautéing is the next best to roasting and sometimes, as in the case of new potatoes, beats it. As a kid, I used to love nothing better than leftover cooked potatoes fried crisp and golden, crunchy and deliriously tasty with a lavish sprinkling of salt and pepper.

This recipe, found in the Good Food magazine, goes not one but two better by the addition of barely wilted spinach leaves and capers tossed into the butter with the spuds. A perfect combo!