Pommes Anna

Since Paris was taken from us by the volcano, I decided to bring a little Paris to Dublin. I made Pommes Anna. According to Wikipdepia, Pommes Anna created during the time of Napoleon III by the chef Adolphe Dugléré, a pupil of Carême, when Dugléré was head chef at the Café Anglais, the leading Paris restaurant of the 19th century, where he reputedly named the dish for one of the grandes cocottes of the period. There is disagreement about which of three beauties the dish was named after: the actress Dame Judic (real name: Anna Damiens), Anna DesLions, or Anna Untel But regardless of how the dish came about, I couldn't see anything wrong with a dish made of just 2 ingredients, potatoes and butter. There's a lot of butter, so how can it be bad? I don't have a pommes Anna pan, which is specially made for this dish. So I had to adjust the recipe some. I made it in my square baking dish with no stove preparation. I think next time I'll do what some others have suggested and make it half on the stove and half in the oven. But it turned out pretty well even with my "adjustments".

 And, no matter how my cooking experiments turn out, my faithful "helper" is always ready to be a taster.