Vegan MoFo: Rosemary Apple Potato Rosti (R is for Rosemary)

The past week has been way too warm for me. Even outside of pregnancy, I don't like being hot; during pregnancy, my tolerance drops or maybe it's that my ability to regulate temperature just fails... either way, being hot makes me crabby. It also makes cooking really terribly unappealing. So I'm delighted to report that today was cool and moist, not rainy so much as misty. I was ready for this.

And it couldn't have lined up more perfectly with today's MoFo, which features one of my favorite things in the world: rosemary!



Josh likes to give me a hard time because I'm always saying things are my favorite. But really, rosemary is up there. It's like nutmeg, I'll put it in basically anything. Sometimes when I have a lot of it, I set some aside and just chew the needles on it. When I was a little kid, I used to really like to make rosemary tea... just rosemary steeped in boiling water with a little sweetener. (Haven't thought about that in a long time. It actually sounds really good right now!)

Of course, I wanted to do something slightly more challenging than just steeping rosemary in hot water for MoFo, heh. Especially since I was passing up a lot of other lovely R items (rhubarb, rutabaga, raisins, relish, etc) for rosemary!

I finally settled on a dish out of this week's PPK Cookbook Challenge book, 500 Vegan Recipes: Rosemary Apple Potato Rosti!



Basically a big cake of shredded potato, apple, onion, and rosemary. Oh, and I put tempeh bacon in mine too because that's just the way I roll. This was such a good recipe: insanely easy (even without a shredding attachment on my food processor), very filling, so potato-y and warm. I was worried that the apple and onion would make it really sweet, but it wasn't sweet at all. Just really good.

Oh, I subbed in fresh rosemary for the dried here. When you use fresh herbs, they're much more delicious but you also need to use more... so instead of 1.5 tsps in the original recipe, I put in... I don't know... maybe a half cup of very finely minced rosemary? Most of a bunch. Wasn't overpowering at all.

The Emperor has been extremely resistant to potatoes lately (yes! potatoes! the food EVERY kid likes!) so I didn't expect him to try this. But he ran into the kitchen shouting "I want to sit in Daddy's chair! I want to eat Daddy's dinner!" and so we let him sit up in J's chair, whereupon he dug into J's serving of rosti with relish. He ate quite a bit of it, stopping to tell me several times, "I'm eating potatoes!" with delight. It was really funny, especially because he really makes a point of enunciating potato... pah-tay-toe. Well, maybe you had to be here...

Here's your bonus picture for tonight. We took it sitting on the couch in the dark living room, hence graininess. He took a bunch of them himself tonight, I'm not sure if this was one of them or not.