You probably don’t think of potatoes as diet food. For a long time, I didn’t either. When I was trying to shed a few pounds last year, potatoes were one of the first things I tossed overboard.
Weight loss was just one of the assignments my doctor gave me when I got my first physical after about a decade of eating everything in sight. There were foods I gave up because they had too much of the wrong kind of cholesterol, like beef, pork, lamb and all the tastier parts of the chicken and the duck, not to mention milk, butter and cheese. I stopped drinking alcohol to save calories and because my liver clearly needed a rest. To bring down the amount of glucose joyriding through my arteries, I gave up foods with a high glycemic index — white flour, white rice, sweeteners and, yes, potatoes.
Recipe: Spicy Curried Potatoes
Staying away from meat, dairy and simple carbohydrates was easy, at least for a short time, because the boundaries were clear. What was harder was figuring out what else I could eat.
I grew up in a house where the star of every dinner was a piece of meat or fish. The meal invariably began with salad and ended with dessert. In between might come pork chops, baked flounder, Shake ’n’ Bake chicken and broccoli or succotash on the side. The formula — main dish and sides — never changed, even when we sat down at TV trays around the Magnavox to Salisbury steak, cobbler and peas-and-carrots, each in its own aluminum-foil efficiency apartment.
In my new diet, I could still have the baked flounder, but the Salisbury steak and pork chops were out. What could replace them? Vegetables were the obvious answer, but I had no clue how to turn them into main courses. I couldn’t get past my memories of the vegetarianism that flourished in grad-school apartments in the 1980s and ’90s, those ponderous stews and casseroles that joined grains and legumes in shotgun marriages meant to put all the essential amino acids on one plate.
Although the idea that we need to eat complementary proteins at every meal was discredited decades ago, it left me with an enduring belief that vegetarian cooking was a complicated math problem. I’ve never been any good at math.
I do know how to read, though. Two books in particular helped guide me out of my meatless wilderness.
The more vegetables I cooked, the more comfortable I got with treating them as the point of the meal.
Julie Sahni’s “Classic Indian Vegetarian and Grain Cooking” convinced me that I could eat vegetables every night and never get bored. In fact, I did eat a wonderful pilaf from the book every night for a week, happily. It was made from millet and mung beans, two ingredients I’d never quite figured out what to do with. “It is a meal in itself,” Sahni wrote, exactly what I wanted to hear.
In “Tender: A Cook and His Vegetable Patch,” Nigel Slater catalogs all the things that grew in his backyard garden or would arrive in his weekly C.S.A. box, providing advice on handling and seasoning each one before he gets into suggested dishes. Even when the recipe felt more like a draft than a finished manuscript, I learned ways of thinking about broccoli and brussels sprouts that helped me make a meal out of them, without the help of meat.
The more vegetables I cooked, the more comfortable I got with treating them as the point of the meal, rather than ancillary characters. Steamed broccoli with sizzled garlic and lemon juice could be dinner. Yellow lentils stewed for half an hour with toasted cumin and grated ginger could be dinner.
And once my blood sugar levels were under control, potatoes could be dinner. I still keep animal fats to a minimum, but I’ve learned that a baked potato with chermoula or chimichurri can be nearly as satisfying as one with sour cream or Cheddar. Shredded potatoes cooked in oil with an egg or two, Spanish style, is a great dinner, and it’s even more interesting with a handful of chopped herbs beaten into the eggs, an idea I got from “Tender.”
My favorite potato supper these days comes from Sahni. She has you boil potatoes and then fry them with curry powder until the powder imprints itself into the cut surfaces, forming crunchy outer walls of spice that surround the starchy white insides. The most complicated thing about it is grinding the curry powder, and while I love the aromatic hum of freshly pulverized curry leaves and coriander seeds, there is no reason you couldn’t just open up a can of curry powder from your spice shelf.
The potatoes are probably good over a bed of coconut yogurt. I’ve never thought they needed accessorizing, though.
Not long ago, I would have told you that this was a side dish. Today, I’d say that the side dish is a social construct.
Pete Wells was the restaurant critic for The Times from 2012 until 2024. He was previously the editor of the Food section.
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