Fried potatoes with poblano pepper, onion, and feta

I like potatoes. When we lived in Krakow I had potato pancakes and mushroom gravy every day for lunch when I wasn't having Pierogi Ruskie (Russian pierogies), which are dumplings filled with mashed potato sprinkled with crispy onion. The name is not universal, however. I used to go to a Ukrainian restaurant sometimes where they insisted that the proper name was Pierogi Ukrainska.

Anyway, I am often perfectly happy with a fried potato breakfast. Never more so than now, as peppers begin to be harvested. Pictured is our first poblano pepper minutes after it was summoned from the garden. Here's what happened:

1. I peeled one idaho potato, then sliced and cubed it into half-inch pieces. Be careful doing the slices! You might want to slice a bit off one side first and use that as a more stable base. Fry in 2T. olive oil, flipping them in the pan--or turning with a spatula, if you must--to get them nice and crispy on the outside, and to allow most of the water inside to evaporate. Season with salt and pepper.

2. Meanwhile, prep a your favorite pepper variety and half a medium onion. Dice onion into 1/2-inch pieces. The peppers are a judgement call. If you have thick-skinned bell peppers dice them as small as you want. If they are thin-skinned like my poblanos make the pieces a little bigger so they don't burn as easily.

3. When the potatoes are about half-way toward being done add the pepper pieces and the onion. I like to remove the potato pieces from the pan actually, so they don't get steamed as the onion pepper mix is cooking down, then I add them back at the end. Your call. Let everything cook until there is no more steam coming up and the vegetables have caramelized some.

4. I finished it with a quarter of a cup of crumbled feta. Other cheeses of a similar consistency would be good too. Season with pepper and serve.

I just eat this straight, for breakfast, but obviously you can do some serious improvising here. Add chorizo. Add frozen peas, lightly cooked asparagus, or other vegetables. Add a scrambled egg. Any of these would make a great filling for some breakfast burritos.

I haven't posted so much this week because we have been patronizing the local establishments. We have a new restaurant/pub down the street called The Royal Peasant. They have been oven a couple of weeks and appear to be perfectly matched to the location in between Earthfare and Five and Ten. Speaking of Five and Ten, we stopped by for the prix fixe a couple of nights back. The food was excellent and full of surprises. I started off with a watermelon arugula salad and a jalapeno vinaigrette. The second course was a chicken bog, a South Carolina specialty. This particular bog has made the big time lately, featured in the New York Times. Really good.

The third course is a Zingerman's candy bar. It's no joke though. They are that good. The one I had, however, was a brilliant reinterpretation of a Snickers bar, the nougat, the nuts the caramel, all excellent quality, finished off with an intense dark chocolate coating. As we always say, we are happy that we can walk home from Five and Ten to get a head start on working off the many calories we so enjoyed.