Potatoes with Afritude…Sorta…

Sunday Morning:

Dan: You know, we have some leftover potatoes. We need to cook them soon.
Hapa: I think I have just the recipe for them…

I stumbled on AJ’s Disney Food Blog the night before, where I remembered looking at a recipe for one of Boma’s* offerings: Potatoes with Afritude. While I don’t recall having this dish when my brother, sister, and I had breakfast at Boma during our August weekend at Disney (I also am not the best at taking pictures when buffets are involved), and Dan never dined at Boma,  it seemed like a simple, tasty, and relatively healthy recipe… It was definitely worth a try.

The recipe is below:

POTATOES WITH AFRITUDE, Boma, Animal Kingdom Lodge
Yield: 10 servings

Ingredients:

• 5 lbs. Red Skinned Potatoes (any variety of potato may be used)
• 2 ounces Olive Oil
• 3 T. Curry Powder
• 2 T. Turmeric
• 1 T. Garlic Powder
• 1 T. Paprika
• Salt and Pepper to taste

Note: I added 1 T. Light Brown Sugar… (per a commenter suggestion on Disney Food Blog)

Method: Wash potatoes well, and cut into wedges. In a large bowl mix the spices and olive oil. Add the raw potatoes. Coat the potatoes with the spice mixture. Place the potatoes on a baking sheet, place in a preheated 350 degree oven and bake for 30 minutes.

Credit: DisneyRecipes.homestead.com via http://www.disneyfoodblog.com/ .

The leftovers Dan referred to were a small amount of reds. I supplemented them with a russet initially and later added another…

I wedged the potatoes the way I would when I make herbed potato wedges.

For visual reference: here are the herbed potatoes I was talking about (these are tossed in olive oil, garlic salt, and thyme and/or rosemary before baking at 350 degrees).

Back to the potatoes I was making this afternoon: I then added the olive oil and spices like I would have with the aforementioned herbed potatoes. They were then placed in a cookie sheet to bake per the recipe.

I ended up cooking them closer to 45 minutes to an hour after mixing them up at the 30 minute point and discovering the reds weren’t quite cooked all the way through.

Here’s how they looked coming out of the oven:

And a couple of finished product shots: A little closer each time…

While these potatoes certainly taste like they could come out of Boma and passed the Dan taste test, the finished product definitely didn’t look like the “Potatoes with Afritude” pictures I’d seen on Disney Food Blog or Dining in Disney.

Changes I’ll make next time:

• Cutting the potato wedges a little longer (and perhaps thinner?)
• Actually referring to the blog pictures…
• Making sure I actually mix the spices and the olive oil separately before adding the potatoes (as the recipe indicates).
• Either making sure I actually have 5 lbs of potatoes (I had about 2.5-3 lbs on hand between both russets and the reds) or doing a better job at adjusting the proportion of spices.

Things I probably won’t change:

• Adding the 1 T. brown sugar to the recipe.

You can almost bet there will be a follow-up blog post when I make my tweaks… We’ll also see which way we also end up liking best…

*Boma is a buffet-style restaurant in the Animal Kingdom Villas’ Jambo House.