Dill Potatoes in Schmaltz

Roughly chop the potatoes. Pinch the cool knife blade between your fingers. Drag it through the sticky, starchy potato-flesh. Ignore the phantom comments that flicker to life in the back of your mind, mechanically repeating warnings about starch and solanine and the glycemic index. Let them dissolve into the snap of your knife against the cutting board.

Scoop a smear of schmaltz from the jar. Run the spoon along the edge of the jar, so that the fat curls eagerly up into the hollow. Ignore the supplementary nagging of the Omega-6 zealots who insist that eating such an unstable substance is a sure path to death by inflammation. If you were going to die of Omega-6 toxicity, you would have done it last week when you went to dinner with your parents and paid attention to the conversation rather than interrogating the waiter about the oil used to roast your chicken.

Melt the schmaltz and toss it with the potatoes. Shake a pinch of salt into your palm and feel the scratch of the grains across your skin. Use packaged, artificially iodized, unnatural table salt. And use as much as you like. Toss it over the potatoes and lick the grains off your fingers.

Break off two cloves of garlic from the bulb and crush them with one thump of your fist on the blade of a knife. Peel away the flayed skins and break apart the cloves with your hands. Do not wait for 10 minutes to maximize allicin production. Toss them into the potatoes.

Chop one sprig of dill and add it to the potatoes, along with a generous shake of pepper. Stir and tumble the potatoes out onto a baking sheet.

Roast at 400 degrees, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are the color of crispy chicken skin. If the words “advanced glycation end-products” pass through your head, pick up a piece of potato hot from the tray, press your teeth through the outer crunch into the fluffy center, and let the schmaltz and garlic dissolve across your tongue.

Serve in unweighed, unmeasured, un-calorie-counted helpings under a fried sausage glistening with fat and beside a heap of roasted vegetables.