fridge rader tartiflette

Fridge raider tartiflette thing

- serves one hungry mouth quickly at lunchtime

contents -

butter – a wee lump

cold spud – a big one

cheese – big chunk

ham – one slice or two

spring onion – two

double cream

bread – a big hunk (or two if you’re hungry)

salt and pepper - tons

It starts with hunger and a quick glance around the kitchen

I am absolutely not kidding when I tell you how tasty this dish is. I sometimes describe it as a posh cheese on toast…with potatoes. It is warming, and comfy, and filling, and best of all? It is so simple. You are using just a frying pan and a grill. Sounds simple enough to me.

Whenever I have the time to roast a baked potato in the oven I will cook two. Leaving one in the fridge for later or the next day. This dish does not use anything that I didn’t have in my fridge to begin with, cream can sometimes be hit-or-miss, but a good substitute is crème fraiche mixed with a little milk. (Is it odd that I am more likely to have crème fraiche in my fridge than cream? I don’t think so).

Get your frying pan at the ready, preheat the grill, slice your hunk of bread, chop up the spring onion and the tattie and rip apart the ham.

Melt the butter in the pan and throw in the potato. It doesn’t matter if it goes all mushy here…that's what you want! Add the ham once it is mushy, followed by the spring onions and heat through. Then just add the cream, half of the cheese and loads and loads of salt and pepper and mix though until you think it’s relatively hot.

My goodness it is as simple as that. A few lines for a method is just what I like to hear.

Take the pan off the heat and toast one side of bread under the grill. Turn it over and mould the potato mixture onto the half-toasted bread. Top with the rest of the cheese and chuck it back under the grill.

The final product is a “carb avoiders” worst nightmare. What with both…bread and potatoes…cheese and double cream. I definitely don’t do things by half. Jumping in head first and not just putting a tip-toe in the water first like usual. It's proper comfort food, the kind of food that I love, and it suits so well.

I didn't really know what it was when I first made it. One of those 'I'm just going to chuck a few things together and see-what-happens' moments. I did a wee bit of reading for this post - isn't Google a wonderful thing? A tartiflette is pretty much what I had made. Slightly tweaked from just being a potato, lardons, cheese, cream and onion dish normally served with a bit of cooked gammon.

I like to keep the skin on the potato whenever possible. I do not see the point in spending extra time taking off the nutrient-rich skin when it tastes so yum. And even when I'm making mashed potatoes, leaving the skin on even just makes it look so much better!

Sometimes if I want to make this a little bit more fresh I like to add some spinach through the mixture, or just chuck some bits of lettuce on the side. It really, of course, depends on what you have in the fridge. I am not saying that I don't go out to the shops to buy things specifically for dishes, but this is a fridge raider blog, recipes utilising the foods you always have, but have never thought of using for dishes on their own.

I hope these posts can at least give you some ideas about quick and easy dishes which you can whip up really easily and also I think it can help to decrease your food wastage. These can be filling meals that don't cost you very much - because you already have the ingredients in the kitchen