JPw/ Cucumber & Onion in Minty Cream Cheese

The funny thing is - and I should stress there's no particular reason for this - I've never baked potatoes.

I guess, in a way, it's just too much hassle for only a small part of a dinner. Maybe if I was already doing a roast, it'd make sense... but it's honestly taken me this long to think "Hey... I could do a jacket potato and give it a topping... That's a great snack meal!"

And so, we have the first post in what may become a new series: JPw/


I'm sure it'll be just like Last Course, in that I only do a couple...

Naturally, I had to research how to bake a potato (and, yes, that became just as ridiculous as it sounds once I'd looked it up - it really is quite simple... if time consuming). Turns out, you just kind of whack them in the oven. Who'd have thought?

The complicated part - and I use the word 'complicated' loosely - is deciding what to put on it, and how to go about preparing that. This is where I tend to lose interest: give me something I can just dump onto the potato, or I'll have something else. That's why I normally go with the all-time classic, butter. Back when I lived with my folks, and the Sunday roast was a lamb joint, I would occasionally embellish my humble baked, buttered spud with mint sauce.

So... It seems that, merely by searching for 'potato baking', one can now find recipes for toppings as well. Being me, I had neither the ingredients nor the inclination to try anything precisely as I found it, so here's what happened for the inaugural JPw/ post:

Ingredients:

• 2 Large Baking Potatoes
• Olive Oil
• Cream Cheese (150g - about half an average tub)
• 1 Small Onion, chopped
• Cucumber - only about an inch worth, diced
• Salt & Pepper (to taste)
• Mint (fresh is best, but <movie_ref="Spaceballs">I used the Schwartz</movie_ref>
• Butter (as much as you like, basically)

Preparation Time: 1.5 hours baking time, plus a couple of minutes preparation either end

Tools Required:

• Sharp Kitchen Knife
• Bowl
• Spoon, for to scoop the cheese and stir

The Process:
Preheat your oven to 200C. Wash your spuds, dry them, and prick the skin a few times. One trick I learned from the interwebs was slathering the surface with olive oil all, then scattering over some salt. The theory is that it should stick to the oil but I'm sure you all know that salt likes to spread itself everywhere. Do the best you can, then just stick them directly onto an oven shelf for an hour and a half. While that's going, make a start on the topping...

First, cut a piece of cucumber, about an inch long, and dice it. I realise that's a tall order unless you're some kind of kitchen ninja - basically, all I mean is chop it into small, roughly cubic chunks. Maybe I should have just said that to start with... Next up, chop your onion. I should mention that this particular recipe is dealing with raw onion. If you have any objections, feel free to substitute with something else (peppers, maybe?), but it does work out, honest!

Scoop about 150g of cream cheese into your bowl. Full fat is always preferable and, just to make things easier, the average tub I found was 300g, so that's roughly half a tub used here. Dump in some salt and pepper, add some mint (I'm being deliberately vague with quantities here - I believe the common phrase is "to taste") and stir it all up. Add in your chopped veg and stir that in. Since this stage takes far less than an hour and a half, stick the mixture back into the fridge until the potato is ready.

Results:
First things first: Topped, baked jacket potatoes are not a quick snack. They take an hour and a half. Think carefully about making yourself a baked jacket potato if, like me, yesterday, you're only making a start on dinner after 7pm. I did this the stupid way, and made the topping up before even starting the potatoes, so I sat down to eat around 9pm. This also accounts for why there are no photos of this little dish either... I was just too darned hungry by the time the potatoes were ready.

I have to confess also that I was a little dubious of my choice to use chopped raw onion - it tends to have rather too much bite. Thankfully, the minty cream cheese and the cucumber took the edge off that quite nicely, giving the potatoes a cool, smooth-yet-crunchy topping that complemented both the crusty skin and the hot, light, fluffy innards.

Along with cheese on toast, baked jacket potatoes are a great way to make use of any silly leftovers you might have lurking in your fridge.