Mrs. Grilling24x7 decided to schedule a brunch with some friends. A brunch!? How can I grill for a brunch? When I think of a brunch I think of a late breakfast. On the menu was chocolate chip pancakes, sausage, and then some other side dish. A light bulb went off and then I found this recipe for grilled home fries. There is a good bit of grilling involved for this recipe but if you are up for the challenge this is a really good home fries recipe. I strongly suggest it for special occasion brunches.
Ingredients:
2 lbs Red Potatoes, parboiled the night before
1 Spanish Onion
1 Red Bell Pepper
1 Yellow Bell Pepper
2 Jalapeno Peppers
2 T butter
Salt and Pepper
Oil (vegetable, canola, olive or whatever you have)
Cast Iron Skillet
This is a really cool recipe because you end up grilling a bunch of things that you normally don’t grill, especially in the morning. The general plan is to grill the onions, the peppers and the potatoes and then put them in a cast iron skillet to get crispy.
The night before I boiled whole red potatoes until they were almost done. I put them in the fridge overnight in a storage container. The next morning I cut up the onion into 1/4 inch slices and cut the partially cooked potatoes into quarters. I drizzled some olive oil all over everything and then prepared the charcoal for medium heat. I arranged the coals over most of the grill so I’d have a lot of room to spread everything out for direct grilling. For the onions I just wanted to get them soft and colored. For the parboiled potatoes I wanted to crisp them up a bit and give them some grill marks. For the peppers I wanted to char the skin quite a bit to get that grilled pepper taste.
Everything can be tossed directly over medium heat until it’s ready. I have a really cool vegetable grilling basket that I used to place the grilled potatoes in. Once the potatoes got some nice grill marks I tossed them in this grilling basket so they’d keep warm.
Don’t forget to grill those jalapeno peppers too. Before you head back inside toss a couple of handfuls of unlit charcoal directly on top of the coal in the grill. This will give you enough heat to cook the home fries in the cast iron skillet.
The next step can be a little frustrating. After the peppers are grilled toss them all into a plastic container and let them sit for about 10 minutes. This will help “sweat” the skin off.
After 10 minutes grab a paper towel and pull all the skin you can get off. They should end up looking like the photo above. It’s not the end of the world if you miss some skin. It won’t ruin anything.
After all of the pepper, potato, and onion grilling it’s time to dice it all up. For the jalapeno peppers if you want some heat, leave the seeds in. If you barely want any heat take all the seeds out of the peppers.
The potatoes will be quite mushy at this point. I roughly chopped them. I don’t like home fries that have huge chunks of potatoes so chopped a little more than the recipe suggests.
Now that most of the food is prepped it’s time to pull out the cast iron skillet. Quite a handy little device for the avid griller. Toss the butter into the skillet and wait for it to melt.
Once the butter has melted toss the potatoes and all of the grilled vegetables into the skillet and press them all down hard with a spatula. I put salt and pepper on at this step.
After about 45 minutes of grilling over direct medium heat the home fries were done. They got a bit darker and were crispy. Oh man did it smell great on my deck! I think my neighbors could really smell the grilled peppers. I got a few looks!
What a fantastic side dish for our brunch. The home fries let me tinker with my grill at about 10 AM, which is always a good thing. But then I got to enjoy some chocolate chip pancakes and sausage links too. I don’t have brunches often but when I do this will be my main side dish! I found this recipe from Bobby Flay’s “Boy Meets Grill” show. It is a real winner. My only word of advice is: don’t forget to season it with salt and pepper before serving it – you need some salt on your home fries. What a fun recipe!
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