Baked Potatoes

Need a good side dish? Baked potatoes. You may be thinking, baked potatoes are boring. Baked potatoes need sour cream and I ran out of that a week ago. Baked potatoes take too long. I hate baked potatoes.

These are no excuses.

My boyfriend, king of modifying foods with a disgusting amount of spices, has come up with the best baked potatoes I ever ate. And it's so simple. Before you put the potatoes in the oven, sprinkle them with salt and red pepper flakes, rub on a little garlic and oil and wrap them in tin foil. The potato skins soak up the flavor nicely. All you need is a little bit of butter and you can eat these potatoes, skin and all. (Before this I never was a potato skin eater either.)

Maybe you are new to this cooking thing. Well, I am here to tell you precisely how to cook a baked potato.

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Poke some holes in the potatoes with tin foil (this prevents them from exploding!), wrap the potatoes in tin foil, and stick them on a cookie sheet and bake for 40-45 minutes, until you can easily stick a fork through them.

If you want your potatoes done quickly, you can just as easily cook them in the microwave. Poke holes in your potato (DO NOT use tin foil this time). Start with 5 minutes and continue adding more time until they are soft enough. This past weekend my dad put the potatoes in the microwave for 5 minutes then finished them  up for about 10 minutes on the grill and they were quite good!