Baked potatoes with arugula and creamy dressing

Dress up your spuds with some great toppings!

Baked potatoes can get a little dull sometimes. While they can be very tasty loaded up with sinful amounts of butter or sour cream, they still don’t shine on the plate. I like twice-baked versions, where you scoop out the cooked flesh, mix it with goodies like cheese, broccoli and green onions, then return the mixture to the skins and bake again till hot. But even that fiddly preparation gets old after a while. I recently remembered a great potato idea featured several years ago one of my favourite food blogs, 101 Cookbooks, in which perfectly baked spuds are stuffed with arugula which has been liberally doused with creamy dressing. Here’s my first attempt. It was divine. I’ll be serving these often.

Ingredients

• 4 medium baking potatoes (I like to use Russets)
• coarse sea salt (Maldon is nice if you have it)
• 1 – 2 teaspoons (5 – 10 mL) olive oil
• 2 cups (500 mL) washed arugula (baby arugula is really nice if you can find it)

Dressing

• 1/2 teaspoon (2.5 mL) salt
• 4 teaspoons (20 mL) white wine vinegar
• 1 teaspoon (5 mL) Dijon mustard
• 2 tablespoons (30 mL) plain yogurt (Greek, if you have it)
• 4 tablespoons (60 mL) good-quality extra virgin olive oil
• 1/4 teaspoon (1.25 mL) freshly ground black pepper

Method

• Preheat oven to 400F.
• Scrub the potatoes and poke a few times with a fork so they don’t explode while baking.
• Rub the potatoes all over with olive oil then sprinkle with salt.
• Place potatoes right on the oven grate and bake until very tender (45 – 60 minutes).
• While potatoes bake, make the dressing.
• In a small bowl, whisk together the vinegar and salt until the salt has dissolved.
• Add Dijon and whisk again until smooth. Stir in yogurt.
• Slowly whisk in olive oil. The dressing should thicken and emulsify. Add pepper and set aside.
• When potatoes are cooked, remove from oven and place on a clean plate.
• Put arugula in a medium bowl and drizzle about half the dressing over it; toss to coat the greens thoroughly.
• Cut a large X into the top of the potatoes and squeeze them gently so they open up a little further.
• Drizzle about two teaspoons of the dressing over the interior of each potato.
• Heap about 1/2 cup of the dressed arugula onto each potato. Serve immediately.