Introduction: Best 2-minute Potato Recipe Ever

Full disclosure: The title is somewhat misleading.

Shocked? I bet you are, but please bear with me. The "2 minutes" part refers to the time you 'll need to spend preparing this recipe. After that, you 'll have to wait another 10 minutes or so for it to be microwaved.


Fortunately, the "best ever" part is accurate (to the best of my knowledge).

Ingredients:

  • 1 medium-sized organically grown potato.
  • 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil, preferably Greek or Italian.
  • a small slice Greek feta cheese.
  • 2-3 leaves spearmint.
  • a pinch of oregano
  • a pinch of freshly ground pepper
  • (optionally) if you want to spice it up, a few drops of sriratcha or sambal oelek (hot chilli sauce)

You will also need:

  • A microwave oven
  • A soup bowl
  • A big piece of baking paper
  • A kitchen knife
  • A pair of heat-proof mittens

Step 1: Cut Potato in Half

After washing well the potato and spearmint, slice the potato in two.

Step 2: Add Ingredients

  1. Place the feta cheese on top of one potato piece.
  2. Sprinkle the oregano and pepper. No need to add salt, feta cheese is salty enough.
  3. Remove the stalk from the spearmint and place the leaves on top of the feta mixture.
  4. If you want your potato more spicy, add a little sriratcha or sambal oelek.

Step 3: Wrap It Up

  1. Move everything into a soup bowl (you could make it there from the start). This forces the paper to take the shape of a bowl and keep the oil inside.
  2. Drizzle the oil on top of the feta.
  3. Cover with the second potato piece, thus making a "potato sandwitch".
  4. Wrap the sandwitch with the paper. This serves two purposes:
    • It keeps the vapours in, preventing the potato from drying out
    • It keeps the flavours in, so that the potato can absorb them.
  5. Place the wrapped sandwitch in the microwave oven and cook it at full power for around 7-12 minutes. The actual time will depend on your microwave oven, the size of the potato and your tastes. After a few times you 'll get the hang of it. Please note that if you place two potatoes instead of one, you 'll have to let them cook for twice as long.
  6. Using the heat-proof mittens, remove the wrapped sandwitch from the microwave oven, unwrap it carefully (there may be some steam escaping, don't let it burn you) and pierce the potato with a fork to make sure it is well done. If not, wrap it again and cook it for a little more.

Watch out!

Do NOT skip the mittens! You may think "but I use the microwave oven every day, only the food gets hot, not the dish", but here we have a different use case. It is one thing to use the oven to heat a dish of food for one or two minutes. In this case, it is true that the heat (produced in the water and fatty molecules of the food) doesn't have time to migrate to the dish. But it is an entirely different thing to cook food in the microwave oven for, say, 10 minutes. In the latter case a lot more energy is produced (which results in the potato being cooked, not just heated) and a certain amount of it has the time to migrate to the dish, where it waits patiently for stray fingers to burn. Make sure it waits in vain!

Step 4: Enjoy!

Let your potato cool down a little (you don't want to handle a hot potato!) and enjoy it.

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