Potato Cups

Potato cups have many uses from serving as starters to providing a novel way of presenting vegetables. The trick is to get them crisp in the first place, and that is very easy to do.

Choose your variety with care, though. Pontiac, sebago and desiree work well, but coliban and sequoia are not really suitable. You'll want medium sized ones for most uses and these needed to be washed and carefully dried

The next step is very easy, simply preheat a conventional oven to 180ºC, 375ºF, and bake the potatoes for 1 hour. Cut off the top thrid of each one, scoop out the flesh leaving a casing about 1 cm thick and brush the outside of this with melted butter. Return the cases to the oven and bake for a further 15 minutes at the same temperature.

That's it - done. You can use the pulp as part of the filling, or to make a nice potato soup, or even to thicken a sauce. Some ideas for filling might be:

• curried tuna or salmon
• sour cream with chives
• cream cheese and smoked salmon
• minted peas
• savoury mince with chili
• caramelized onions

.....and so on. There is really no limit to what you can do and no waste either.

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