So last week, the boyfriend and I were chatting about a date we’d had the day before. We’d gone to a very nice restaurant and both ordered duck in chocolate sauce on mashed potato (with a fancier name!). And I mentioned I’d been watching a cooking show where the contestants were challenged to make a menu with potato in every dish, including a chocolate and potato brownie for dessert. I was going over to the boyfriend’s for dinner the next day and we joked about him doing a chocolate and potato menu. I expressed skepticism that he could pull off a chocolate and potato starter.

He took this as a challenge.

I turned up the next day for dinner, and was fed the following…

(note: I give up. The pictures can just stay sideways. Click the thumbnails to see them the right way up on photobucket!)

I arrived to be presented with chocolate martinis (made with potato vodka, of course) and chocolate dipped homemade cumin crisps. People have asked about the crisps – boyfriend says they’d not hard to do, but it’s a lot of work for not a lot of results, though they are very tasty.

The starter was a new potato, rocket and orange salad with chocolate balsamic dressing. Apologies for the fuzziness of the photo. This is definitely a dish I’m making him pull out again, and my disbelief in chocolate/potato starters has been truly wiped out.

The main was a chocolate double whammy: beef in chilli chocolate sauce, on a bed of white chocolate mash. The mash was probably the only element of the menu I really doubted would taste nice, when the boyfriend described it to me, but I was again proved wrong. It definitely wants to be paired with a strong flavour; the dark chocolate and chilli worked really well with it.

Pudding was the aforementioned chocolate and potato brownie (it’s quite hard to find other dessert recipes with potato in!) with orange cream and an orange sauce. The boyfriend felt that apparently chocolate and potato didn’t tie the meal together enough, and other repeated themes needed  introducing!

And to finish off, we had proper hot chocolate (you could stand a spoon up in it) and potato biscotti. I think I prefer potato biscotti to the normal kind, especially when just baked.

So, a five course meal with chocolate and potato in every course is not only possible, but very tasty. Overall, the savoury dishes benefitted more from the chocolate than the sweet did from the potato – brownies are brownies are brownies – but this is definitely worth having a play with for a dinner party.

Now, what combination shall I be skeptical of next?