Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Stuffed Potatos
Nota bene: start well ahead of when you want to serve them: these don't care if they're cold in the middle of the process, and you can do the 'rice crispie squares' trick of pretending these are all crazy hard to make, and aren't you cool?
You will need:
Baker potatos, 1 per person, and one or two extra, because they'll get eaten.
Cream cheese
other cheese (I usually use cheddar)
milk
bacon bits
You already have:
butter or margarine
an oven
a baking tray/cookie sheet
a 'how to cook everything' cookbook.
Bake the potatos. Your 'how to cook everything' cookbook will tell you how. Personally, I use the microwave, with the button that says "potatoes". Remember to stab them with a fork several times first, or they'll explode.
Once the potatos are cool enough to handle, cut them lengthwise, as close to the skin as you can manage, so you end up with a 3/4 potato and a 1/4 (or less) potato. Scoop out the potato insides into a pot, without getting too close to the skin - the potato shells should hold their own integrity. Do this to both parts; the 3/4 and the 1/4.
Over top of the potatos, dump a generous amount of butter, a couple kinds of cheese, crumbled bacon, and some milk. Either mash it or beat it until it's evenly-ish mixed.
You will note no proportions in the last paragraph, beyond "generous". That's the thing that makes this recipe so easy. Too much cheese? Oops, darn. Not enough bacon? Oops, darn. The potatos don't care. You're basically just making mashed potatos and adding some tasty things. I usually use bacon, butter, cream cheese, shredded aged cheddar and milk, but there's no magic list. Use what you like!
Spoon the mashed stuff back into the potato shells. You will have more stuff than space to put it. Pile up more on top so that it looks a little bit like the potatoes exploded in the oven, and this tasty stuff just spilled out. If you still have more, you can pile stuff onto the 1/4 shells as well. I've done this the last couple times instead of making potato skins, and it worked well.
A little while before you're going to eat, say, 15 minutes or so, put them into an oven preheated to 350f. For the last two minutes, put them on the top rack, and switch your oven over to broil. Watch them. Watch them. When the tips of stuff start to turn brown, take them out and serve.
These are tasty, just like you'd expect baked potatos with cheese and bacon and butter mixed in, and look fancy and complicated. Perfect for impressing people like family-in-law or prospective dates. (Um, probably not both at the same time. Just sayin'.)
James
ps: I had to go through about a thousand times to spell potato(e) consistently. Because in my brain, potatoe looks wrong, but potatoes looks right. In the interests of electron conservation, I went with the shorter versions.
Also, if you're reading this on Monday, note the time travel, because it's posted on Tuesday. /creepy music
Labels: Cooking isn't complicated
posted by James at 10:58 AM
1 Comments:
Potato is correct while Potatoes is the plural. There is no singular Potatoe. After all didn't a vice president get into trouble at a spelling contest when he spelled Potato as Potatoe. I just can not remember which VP it was LOL!
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