Roasted "Fingerling" Potatoes

One of the two recipes I picked for the cookbook project was roasted fingerling potatoes from the Williams-Sonoma A Taste of the World cookbook (one of the United States recipes).  I didn't really want to buy bread to accompany the soup and wasn't sure if the soup would be enough for dinner on its own, so I thought some potatoes might be a good side dish.

The recipe was fairly simple except for one thing - we couldn't find fingerling potatoes.  We did find a 5 pound sack of gourmet potatoes at Costco, which included fingerling potatoes, but that was a lot more potatoes than we needed and we thought they would be easy to find at the grocery store. No luck!  The recipe did say we could use "other waxy potatoes" so we ended up substituting those little red potatoes for the fingerling potatoes.  We had no idea fingerling potatoes would be so hard to find!

Ingredients:

- Fingerling/other waxy potatoes (2 lbs - $4.99)

- Rosemary (used about half the package - $1.25)

- Sea salt (already had this - $0)

- 1 head of garlic ($0.50)

- Olive oil (already had this - $0)

The total for this dish was about $6.75 (not including ingredients we already had in the pantry), which is not that different from how much a side dish of roasted potatoes would cost in a restaurant.  I suppose that in this case they're fresh, homemade, and the portion size is a lot more than what you would get in a restaurant side order, but I was just surprised at how much it ended up costing.  I think you could make this same recipe with regular potatoes cut into smaller pieces, and it would be just as good and would cost much less.  (Actually I think A did make that at some point before...)

The recipe was fairly easy, but the time consuming part was cleaning the potatoes. (They don't look great in the photo but I felt the need to clean out the eyes of the potatoes.)  After that, all you have to do is coat the potatoes in olive oil and roast them in the oven for about 30 minutes (turning them a few times), surrounded by rosemary leaves and unpeeled cloves of garlic.

The finished potatoes don't look as attractive as the pre-roasted potatoes but they came out pretty well.  They were soft and not dry/chalky.  Garlic and rosemary go really well with potatoes, and the light seasoning was good.  The potatoes ended up being an appetizer instead of a side dish since the soup was still simmering on the stove, but I think they were a success.  I would definitely be interested in making this again, but I hope next time the potatoes will be a little less expensive!