My Grandma’s Home Fries

My brother is an infrequent guest on my social media page. But whenever I post him, I get comments like: “So, what’s your brother’s name?”, “How does he like his eggs in the morning?”, “Let’s focus the camera more on your brother”, and so on. This intro would definitely feed into his ego, but I’m pretty confident he doesn’t read my newsletters.

He’s in the process of moving to Miami and had some free time in his schedule. He shot me a text last week saying that he decided he was visiting me in New York. And the expectation fell to me to start crafting the itinerary.

Trying to book reservations in New York is not fun. It’s basically a full-time job. And after spending at least three hours scouring Resy for open tables, my corneas and frontal lobe were beyond fried. I decided at least one of the meals would just be easier at my place.

A little-known fact about my brother is that he’s been working at my family’s pizza restaurant in Richmond, VA, for the past year (If you’re in the area, I highly recommend you check it out. The pizza is amazing. And my cousins are always there, so say hi for me.). He’s been the head pizza guy and somehow learned everything there is to know about dough, sauce, and cheese.

I thought it would be funny to craft the menu around celebrating his tenure at the pizza restaurant. I knew I wanted to make a hot honey pepperoni focaccia a la Prince St Pizza. (I used Caroline Anderson’s classic recipe, with a thin layer of pizza sauce brushed on and pepperoni layered before baking + plenty of hot honey drizzled on over top to finish). He also demanded steak… He has expensive tastes. I tried my hardest to find porterhouses, but had to settle on bone-in rib-eyes. I thought basting them in essentially a pizza compound butter sounded absolutely delicious and on theme. Garlic, anchovy, oregano, chilies, tomato paste. You’re already basting steaks with like half these ingredients anyway. Why not take it all the way there?

You can’t have steaks without potatoes. He ordered me to make smashed potatoes, but I had something better: the only hand-written recipe my grandma had passed down to us for, you guessed it: home fries. Of all the food my Grandma made, I guess I’ll settle for the home fries recipe. Truthfully, these potatoes were always transcendent. I just knew them as "the potatoes” during our family dinners. They are crunchy, fried, salty golden nuggets that are addicting all on their own right. Just 3 ingredients, potato, salt, and oil, convert into the most memorable potato I’ve ever had. I haven’t had them since my Grandma made them, oh, maybe 15 years ago at this point. It felt time to finally make them again. When I tasted them for the first time since then last week, I was instantly transported back to my childhood days at my Grandma’s house. The memory of her standing at the stove laboring over perfectly over-seasoned home fries. Funny how food works like that.

Also funny enough, my other grandparents (hi Gigi, since I know you’re reading this - unlike my brother.), gifted me their All-Clad 6-qt sautepan, which was the same model my “home fry Grandma” cooked her potatoes in. So in a @handmethefork kind of way, I could not have been more excited to make my Grandma’s potatoes in the same pan she had always cooked them in.

To round out the dinner, I made Caesar-dressed roast Brussels sprouts and a Citrus Brulee Tart from Helen Goh’s latest cookbook “Baking and the Meaning of Life” which is a stunning, beautiful book that I highly recommend.

It was a lovely night to start a weekend of activities with my brother (which involved walking an absurd number of neighborhoods in the rain, trying to eat lunch at Via Carota two days in a row, and watch shopping in Chinatown).

For pizza,

Ryan