Potatoes

For brunch tomorrow, I'm smoking a brined turkey breast over pecan chips. With luck, it will be ready before midnight.

We've got some B&B french toast to go with it, and (knock wood) a terrine of grilled vegetables and goat cheese. In case we're still hungry, I'm planning to improvise a little fig clafoutis.

But, watching the turkey smoke, I thought that maybe we might want a potato.

Now, home fries are good and they're fairly virtuous, but brunch comes with a special dispensation for Things That Might Not Be Particularly Good For You, and so I started thinking about a galette or something of that ilk. But which of that ilk?

If I were well equipped, I guess I'd just get out Larousse. But I don't have Larousse. I did happen to remember this page, though: Tallyrand's Guide To The Potato. It's a nice piece of tech writing: a guide to lots of classical French potato dishes, sorted by shape and ingredients. For example, potatoes lorette are simply

As for dauphine potatoes but shaped into short cigars

I've been working hard on my Sydney talk, "False Intentions and the Fallacy of Finding", which explores the limitations of search and signage on the Web. [ozia2006] This is a great example: how do you use Google to find "that well-written page comparing all those classical French potato preparations"? It's not easy! I eventually found a route, via a deliberately incoherent search: "pommes anna fondant".