Potatoes. Boiled, baked, sautéed, and fried– it seems that this season I cannot get enough of them. Maybe it’s the cold weather. The crunchy ice paving the sidewalk outside my apartment makes me want to stay in near the fire, a stack of books to my left, and a piping hot tuber to my right. Carbohydrates, how I love ya! The potato may be perfect in all of its grubby glory, but when you are eating them for days on end (as I have been), they may require a bit of gussying up to make them special once again. Enter the twice-baked potato:

My mother comes from a fairly large family that, for years, gathered together at my grandma’s house for every holiday imaginable. There would be piles of food, far too much for even this family with so many hungry mouths to feed. But a starch that always had a place at the ever-growing buffet table was the twice-baked potato. To the young me, this was the ideal carbohydrate. Self-contained, with whipped potatoes within (who didn’t love mashed potatoes?), a crunchy, almost dry exterior, and the burnished skins– it was every marvelous aspect of the potato, all rolled into one.

I stole the recipe with my eyes. Recalling my grandma baking pounds of potatoes, she scooped out the centers, the potato steaming and almost crumbling into a mixing bowl. Then mashed potatoes were made from this interior, and messily stuffed back into the skins. My grandma always put a sprinkling of paprika on top. “For color more than anything,” she would tell me. Then the potatoes would go back into the oven, to earn their name, at 400 degrees for at least 30 minutes. A pat of butter melting over the top, and I was in potato heaven.

When I was first earning my cooking chops, and having dinner parties from time to time, twice-baked potatoes were a stand-by for me as well. They were so simple to make, and everyone seemed to have some memory of consuming them as a child. But above all, they became a frequent visitor at my dinner parties, because they were the type of food you could make, and then forget about while sautéing a vegetable or keeping your eye on the roasting meat.

Now, my cooking seems to run in cycles. It had been years since I had made what once had been a standard. While scrubbing my potatoes one night for dinner, twice-baked potatoes popped into my head like a greatest hit that keeps playing in redundancy. That night Brian and I had those potatoes again, and I loved them as much as I did as a child. Sometimes, classics will just do that to you.