Roast potatoes with sauce gribiche

This is how we prepared the summer's first Red Norland potatoes.  This intriguingly named recipe - “gribiche?” - is from Super natural every day  by Heidi Swanson. It’s a kind of roast potato salad with lots of eggs and extra vegetables. The original recipe (more or less) is below, followed our slightly different version.

1 ½ lb potatoes
½ c plus 2 Tbsp olive oil
Salt
12 oz broccoli florets
4 large hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped
2 Tbsp red wine vinegar
1 tsp Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp capers, chopped
2 shallots, chopped (or 1 small bunch green onions)
1 Tbsp chopped fresh parsley
1 Tbsp chopped fresh tarragon
1 Tbsp chopped fresh chervil or chives

Preheat the oven to 400F with two racks in the top and middle of the oven. Grease two shallow roasting tins or rimmed baking sheets.

Scrub the potatoes and remove any large eyes with the tip of a potato peeler. Very small potatoes can be left whole. Cut larger potatoes into roughly 1-inch chunks. Toss the potatoes with 1 Tbsp olive oil, season with a bit of salt, and turn them onto one of the baking sheets. Roast until they are cooked through and starting to brown, about 30 minutes.  Stir them a couple times while they are cooking.

About 15 minutes before the potatoes are done, toss the broccoli with 1 Tbsp oil, sprinkle with salt, place them on the other baking sheet and put in the oven as well. The potatoes and broccoli should be finished at about the same time.

To make the sauce gribiche, whisk together the vinegar and the remaining ½ c olive oil, then stir in the mustard, capers, shallots, herbs and a little salt. Fold in the chopped eggs.

Put the warm potatoes and broccoli in a large bowl and gently toss with the dressing. Taste and adjust the flavours if needed. Serves 6.

How we made it:

Instead of broccoli, we roasted some thick slices of cabbage (an inspiration from Donna Hay’s book Fast, fresh, simple). The centres of the cabbage slices took longer to cook than the outsides – so we removed the cooked parts after 15 minutes and put the raw parts back in the oven for a while. If you use cabbage, we suggest you cut the slices into smaller pieces for more even cooking.

We used Whitsend green onions instead of shallots and cider vinegar instead of red wine vinegar. A small amount of chopped dill filled in for the herbs. The results were altogether successful.