Baked Potatoes With Hemp Filling

Serves 4

These scrumptious potatoes offer a crisp crust and a creamy interior that’s packed with flavor. They can easily be wrapped and reheated in the oven later in the week for a make-ahead meal.

• ½ cup raw cashews
• 4 large baking potatoes, scrubbed
• 3 Tbs. nutritional yeast
• 2 Tbs. coconut oil, melted
• 2 Tbs. lemon juice
• 1 ½ Tbs. yellow miso paste
• ½ cup finely chopped fresh chives, minced, divided
• ½ cup finely chopped fresh parsley, minced, divided
• ½ cup hemp seeds, divided

1. Soak cashews in large bowl of cold water 1 hour.

2. Preheat oven to 400°F. Bake potatoes 45 to 60 minutes on baking sheet, or until tender. Cool 15 minutes, or until easy to handle.

3. Drain and rinse cashews. Blend cashews with nutritional yeast, coconut oil, lemon juice, and miso in food processor until smooth. Transfer to large bowl.

4. Slice off top one-third of each potato lengthwise, and discard top skin. Scoop potato flesh into cashew mixture, removing as much flesh from potato skin as possible without misshaping potato. Repeat with remaining potatoes. Mix well to incorporate cashew mixture into potato flesh while leaving some texture. Add 1/4 cup chives, 1/4 cup parsley, and 1/4 cup hemp seeds. Stuff mixture back into potato skins.

5. Place potatoes on baking sheet, and bake 15 to 20 minutes, or until tops are golden. Serve garnished with remaining chives, parsley, and hemp seeds.

Baked Potatoes Three Ways

Baked Potatoes Three Ways

Baked Potatoes

By Sam Sifton

Twice-Baked Potatoes With Cauliflower and Cheese

By Sam Sifton

Baked Potatoes With Crab, Jalapeño and Mint

By Sam Sifton

The nights are coming faster now, and dead leaves rustle across grass and sidewalk. “Look at that moon,” Thornton Wilder wrote in “Our Town.” “Potato weather, for sure.”

Baked-potato weather, for sure. Slide a rack of russets into a hot oven for 45 minutes while you sort mail or pay bills, check email or help someone with homework. Set up a fixings bar of butter and bacon and Cheddar, chives and sour cream. The reward is one of the great, undervalued actors in all dinner theater: Mr. Split-Top himself, dressed in finery.

A recipe for basic baked potatoes follows. The key instructions are to pierce the jackets of the potatoes in a number of places to allow them to exhale steam as they cook; to lightly grease their exteriors with oil, so that they crisp; and to salt them a little, just because.

Be patient as they cook, and feel absolutely no pressure to accompany them with anything but toppings. If bacon and Cheddar do not appeal, you can try a combination of thyme, chervil and chives. The hedge-fund set may prefer a heaping tablespoon of caviar.

Dressed to your tastes, a baked potato makes a nice accompaniment to a slice of prime rib or a steak, even a roasted chicken. It is also quite nice served with a tart salad.

But a baked potato can be a meal too. This is particularly the case when you start making additions to the starch — cauliflower and cheese in the case of the second recipe, and crab meat, jalapeño and mint (cheese, too!) in the case of the third.

For the cauliflower version, abide by the teachings of the great British home cook and writer Nigel Slater, and cook the florets in milk scented with bay leaves as you bake the tubers. You’ll be rewarded with a sweet pairing for the starchy potato flesh, beautifully countered by the salty nuttiness of Parmesan at the end. For the crab, be very gentle with the meat, tossing it lightly with lemon, mint and jalapeño. The idea is to have a topping to the mashed potatoes that is pillowlike in its delicacy.

These potatoes are sometimes called twice-baked. That is a misnomer, but still an excellent name. They’re baked, then disassembled, then heated through with a cheese hat that melts across their surface. The amount of time added to the overall process is neither negligible nor problematic. The result is a simple, elegant one-plate dinner, an old-school pleasure best consumed with friends.

Be patient as they cook, and feel absolutely no pressure to accompany them with anything but toppings. If bacon and Cheddar do not appeal, you can try a combination of thyme, chervil and chives,