>>Or, yeah, the peas. They all disliked them, but after a while they learned to love rizi-bizi (i.e. rice and peas). Go figure.
>
>That sounds like the carribean "delicacy"?

No idea where we got that. It just appeared, probably via the German branch of the wider family. And, BTW, they love anything that can be eaten with chopsticks.

>>I've seen huge specimens cooked in alumin(i)um foil, but I've really never seen them roasted in gravy, along with the turkey or other meat (what we call "baker's potatoes").
>
>No, no, no. You chop the spuds to manageable sizes and roast them in the meat tray with the meat, in its juices

Halves, not spuds. So they develop a little crust, get brown and a bit skinned on the edges, and get really soft inside. Better than the meat from which they got the taste :).

OTOH, another delicacy of ours is the musaka - a layer of potato slices, a layer of ground meat with scrambled eggs (or just meat), a layer of slices etc... a total of five layers. In a pyrex square pan in the oven. Now the real delicacy is the pleasure of scratching the browned out and stuck potato slices off the bottom and edges :). These bits have a special taste and cause tooth itch (for more).

> They have to be par-boiled first of course. What you mentioned is "baked spuds" isn't it?

Halves... and no #define or other preprocessing. They just have to stay in there long enough.

>Try roasties, cooked with the fennel in which they were par-boiled. You'll praise my name. :-)

Can you just email me the recipe and then I may dare pass it to my commander-in-chief-de-cuisine (aka wife). I dare not reach out of my barbecue limits. And the few times I do popara (which is basically stale bread with cheese, but I've reinvented it: just chop some bread into a bowl, add chopped anything of the dry meat stuff - bacon, ham, sausage - microwave at full for a minute, add maybe an egg, maybe some cream, cover with cheese but leave the eggwhite uncovered, cover only the yolk so it doesn't cook hard - cook for another minute or two, until the egg white is not translucent anymore and the cheese has melted and you're done; sprinkle oregano or curry, add ketchup if you like... almost anything goes).