Short On...? Carry On, Part Four: Potato Things

Some people have written way more extensively than I ever have about ways to cook potatoes. I do not claim to be that much of a potato expert. 

Often the two of us settle for instant potato flakes. If you're buying potato flakes, look for Idahoan brand in a box, no flavouring, no additives. We have never found anything else that comes close.

But here are a few sort of different things we've done with real potatoes.

Baked Potato Soup: Mentioned here multiple times over the years. Cut the recipe in half if you have a 3 1/2 quart slow cooker, and in half again if you have an even smaller family and smaller slow cooker. Vegetable broth works as well as chicken broth; you can eyeball the amount of liquid if you're cutting the recipe.

Potato Casserole #1:  Making a potato casserole uses up as many potatoes as you have...and "potato casserole" could be as simple as cooking cut-up (sliced or chunked) potatoes in some broth or milk, and adding a little seasoning...and that could be in a pot, in the oven, or in the slow cooker.  Add some of the carrots and an onion, and you're on your way to stew.

Potato Casserole #2: If you have a boring ground-meat or vegetable casserole in the freezer, you can thaw it, maybe add a bit of extra seasoning, and top with mashed potatoes to make Shepherd's Pie.

Pizza Potatoes: cut-up potatoes, pizza sauce, pepperoni, and cheese, baked in a casserole or done in the slow cooker. Optional toppings: sliced olives, green peppers.

Mexican Potato Casserole, which we found in Company's Coming Kids: Lunches, but which is almost identical to the one on the Mennonite Girls Can Cook, and they say they got it from a church cookbook.  So it seems like one of those recipes that's made the rounds.  You coat cut-up potatoes in melted margarine and taco seasoning and bake them in a casserole; then, about ten minutes before serving, you add browned ground beef mixed with salsa and chopped peppers, and cheese on top. I just used the amounts of everything that we had on hand, including homemade taco seasoning and mild Cheddar instead of Jack cheese, but we thought it was pretty good.  (The recipe says not to peel the potatoes, but we prefer them peeled.)

Ranch-Spiced Potatoes in the Slow Cooker  This is pretty much Mexican Potato Casserole without the meat on top, and with different seasonings. You can also use homemade Sloppy Joe seasoning mix.

Perogy Casserole, Treehouse Version

Cook 15 lasagna noodles in a big potful of boiling water.
Prepare 2 cupfuls of mashed potatoes (you can use the same pot).
Grate or chop 2 ounces (at least; we like more) Cheddar cheese and mix this with the mashed potatoes; add some pepper and 1/4 tsp. onion powder. You can also add salt at this point; when I first wrote this out, we were trying to cut back on sodium.
Mix 1 cup cottage cheese with 1 egg or equivalent replacer, and another 1/4 tsp. onion powder.
Melt 1/2 cup butter or margarine  in a small skillet or pot; add 1 small onion, chopped small; cook until onion is soft.

Grease or spray a 9 x 13 inch pan; if you have one with a lid, use that; otherwise you'll have to cover the pan with foil.
Line the bottom of the pan with 1/3 of the noodles.
Cover with cottage cheese mixture.
Cover with second layer of noodles.
Cover with mashed potato mixture.
Cover with third layer of noodles.
Cover with hot cooked onions-margarine/butter mixture.
Cover the pan and bake for 30 minutes.  Let sit 10 minutes before slicing.

From the not-long-ago archives: Ranch-spiced Potatoes (two ways)

Recipe posted January 2015

Christmas 2016 update: I made this for Christmas Day brunch, in the slow cooker (four hours on high, cut the potatoes fairly small), and it worked fine. I also left out the sugar and cut the pepper in half.

The ranch dressing mix is from Stephanie O'Dea's book More Make it Fast, Cook it Slow, but I've cut it in half for this recipe. The mix doesn't appear on her website, and I haven't found it anywhere else, although there are lots of other ranch seasoning mixes out there. Most of them use dill, and this one doesn't, which is one reason my family likes it. If you have some other ranch or seasoning mix you like, give it a try instead.

Ranch-Spiced Potatoes

Ingredients:
6 to 8 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and cubed (large dice)

1/4 cup butter or margarine

Seasonings, to total about 1/4 cup:
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. dried minced garlic or garlic powder
1 1/2 tbsp. dried minced onion, or onion flakes
1 tsp. black pepper (or less)
1 tsp. sugar (optional)
1 1/4 tsp. paprika
1 1/4 tsp. parsley flakes

Optional: sour cream

Grease a large casserole dish or pan (it doesn't have to have a lid). Put the potatoes into the pan. Melt the butter or margarine and mix in the combined seasonings. Stir into the potatoes. Bake uncovered at 400 to 425 degrees F for about 45 minutes, stirring once during cooking, and probably when you take them out to make sure they haven't stuck to the pan. You can add in some sour cream near the end of the cooking time, but we don't usually bother.

What's for supper? Potato dinner, change of flavours

Tonight's dinner menu, changed slightly:

Two skillet dinners, one with ground beef, one with romano beans; pizza sauce, celery, onion, tomato puree, mushrooms, leftover potatoes, seasonings. Italian cheese blend if you want.

An experiment-cake made with blueberries and half a bag of frozen cranberries. It is very soft and fruit-heavy, so definitely a fork-eater.

What's for supper? Starts with P

Tonight's dinner menu:

Polish wieners
Potato casserole (chopped potatoes, vegetable broth, olive oil, smoked paprika, kosher salt)
Peas

Last night's fruit crisp.

What's for supper? A new soup recipe

Tonight's dinner menu:

Leanne Ely's Double Potato Soup, made in two pots so that one doesn't have chicken broth.
Gayle's Peasant Bread, one loaf with poppy seeds, one with sesame
Bacon
Cheese

Apples, oranges (see, two kinds of fruit too)

What's for supper? Taco potatoes

Tonight's dinner menu:

Taco potatoes (cut up, spiced and baked in the toaster oven). For carnivores: ground beef, salsa and cheese on top. For vegetarians, potatoes scooped out before adding meat. For everyone: other choices like sour cream, olives, more salsa.  Tortilla chips would have been nice but you can't have everything.

Acorn Squash, cut in eighths and cooked on the stove

James Barber's mother's "Steamed Pudding," with blueberries.

How do you make ranch-spiced potatoes?

This was the main part of tonight's meal. We've made something similar with taco seasoning, but this is our all-purpose version. The ranch dressing mix is from Stephanie O'Dea's book More Make it Fast, Cook it Slow, but I've cut it in half for this recipe. The mix doesn't appear on her website, and I haven't found it anywhere else, although there are lots of other ranch seasoning mixes out there. Most of them use dill, and this one doesn't, which is one reason my family likes it. If you have some other ranch or seasoning mix you like, give it a try instead.

Ranch-Spiced Potatoes

Ingredients:
6 to 8 medium-sized potatoes, peeled and cubed (large dice)

1/4 cup butter or margarine

Seasonings, to total about 1/4 cup:
1 tsp. kosher salt
1 tsp. dried minced garlic or garlic powder
1 1/2 tbsp. dried minced onion, or onion flakes
1 tsp. black pepper
1 tsp. sugar
1 1/4 tsp. paprika
1 1/4 tsp. parsley flakes

Optional: sour cream

Grease a large casserole dish or pan (it doesn't have to have a lid). Put the potatoes into the pan. Melt the butter or margarine and mix in the combined seasonings. Stir into the potatoes. Bake uncovered at 400 to 425 degrees F for about 45 minutes, stirring once during cooking, and probably when you take them out to make sure they haven't stuck to the pan. You can add in some sour cream near the end of the cooking time, but we don't usually bother.

What's for supper? Mostly potatoes

Tonight's dinner menu:

Ranch-spiced potatoes
Peameal bacon
Baked beans (canned)

Cran-apple crisp mini muffins

What's for supper? Cold day warm-up

Tonight's dinner menu:

Lentil-vegetable soup, with diced leftover beef for meat eaters to add to their bowls

Mashed-potato scones, with ketchup, salsa, or applesauce

Salad if you wanted it.

What's for supper? Stuffed potatoes or potato casserole?

Tonight's dinner menu:

I found a Baked Potato Casserole recipe in the $5 Dinners One-Dish cookbook, then realized it was just a variation on this Taste of Home stuffed potato dish.  Same ingredients, different way of doing it, plus $5 Dinners adds chopped ham.  The potatoes are baking in the toaster oven, but I'm still deciding whether to put the broccoli, potato innards and cheese into the potato shells, or just bake them together in one dish.  Went with the casserole--it's kind of like a giant broken-open baked potato with toppings.  Left the ham out, steaming Euro wieners on the side.

Dessert:  Thinking about gingerbread, after the potatoes come out. We still have a bit of whipped cream left from Thanksgiving...and blueberries!

Frugal Finds and Fixes: featuring Mr. Fixit

The past week has meant ultra-cold temperatures all over the place (unless maybe you're in Australia), which is not good for people, heating bills, water mains, and vehicles.  Our van had a leak in one of its tires, with the weather at least partly to blame.

We discovered this early Saturday morning, but the only tire-fixer at the nearby shop had called in sick, and they asked us to wait until Monday.  After keeping it pumped up long enough to handle Saturday groceries and Sunday church, Mr. Fixit was worried enough to take it into the Big Tire Chain on Sunday afternoon, but it turns out they're not a warranty dealer for our brand of tires, and the tire was still fairly new.  So on Monday Mr. Fixit went to the other shop and got a new tire for the van, free under the warranty but paying the service charge to put it on.  He drove away to run another errand, but when he came out to the van he noticed there was no little cap on the tire, where you pump it up.  He went back to the shop and inquired about the missing cap, and was told that Caps Are Now Extra.  No way.  He further inquired where the cap to the old tire might be.  The tire-fixer had to fish through the trash can to find it, but we got it back. So there's our automotive frugal tip for the week, which also applies, unfortunately, to other businesses these days:  don't expect even small things to come gratis.  Ask to make sure.

Mr. Fixit has a 1958 Simpson 260 analog multimeter (their photo) that he got free over thirty years ago when his high school shop class went digital.  (He says most of the digital meters got blown within a year, and the school had to re-replace them.)  He used to use it a lot with older cars, but it had been pretty much set aside for the past decade.  Recently his newer, digital meter (the second in the past few years) quit on him, and he decided to resurrect the Simpson.  After cleaning it and replacing its batteries, he used it to test the voltages in a radio he was repairing, and he says it still works well.

Mr. Fixit also negotiated a slightly better deal this week with our Internet provider.  We were considering switching, so the company offered us a please-stay incentive.  That was supposed to kick in today, so there's not much so far to say about whether what we're getting is really faster or better.

From this Treehouse it seems like food prices are going up again.  We are trying hard to make the most of what we have, use leftovers, cook up bits and pieces.  This week we had a lot of ground beef in the freezer, so we've had both lasagna and Mexican Potato Casserole, which we found in Company's Coming Kids: Lunches, but which is almost identical to the one on the Mennonite Girls Can Cook website, and they say they got it from a church cookbook.  So it seems like one of those recipes that's made the rounds.  You coat cut-up potatoes in melted margarine and taco seasoning and bake them in a casserole; then, about ten minutes before serving, you add browned ground beef mixed with salsa and chopped peppers, and cheese on top. I just used the amounts of everything that we had on hand, including homemade taco seasoning and mild Cheddar instead of Jack cheese, but we thought it was pretty good.  (The recipe says not to peel the potatoes, but we prefer them peeled.)

We also made pizza on the weekend, using bread-machine pizza dough; a batch of granola; and I turned a cupful of mashed sweet potato into two dozen half-size muffins.

Finally:  Mama Squirrel was browsing through a particular money website and blog, and came across a post about holiday spending.  The author described what their family had spent on gifts and so on, and then other people commented and shared some of their "holiday totals."  The most common comment was something like, "Yes, we have a set budget for our Christmas gifts, entertainment etc., and it can't total more than X." And that would have been fine, except that X, for our family, would be an astronomical amount. And though in general that would not surprise me at all, these are people who read and comment on a financial, money-saving blog.  

Which makes me worry a lot about the people who don't read money blogs.

What do you think?

Perogy Casserole

Ponytails requested this for Christmas dinner.  It's a pretty common recipe: lasagna noodles, potatoes, cheese and diced onions; but I had worked out our own lower-sodium, streamlined version of it a few years ago, and posted it to our former food blog, Low Sodium Frugal.  And when I went looking for our recipe tonight (after the power came back on), I suddenly remembered that LSF is gone.  Oops.  But I did have a printed out copy, so here it is.

If you're not going for rock-bottom low sodium, you can add more cheese, some salt, etc.  This was just the way I cut it back when Mr. Fixit was on a very low-salt diet.

Perogy Casserole, Treehouse Version

Cook 15 lasagna noodles in a big potful of boiling water.
Prepare 2 cupfuls of mashed potatoes (you can use the same pot).
Grate or chop 2 ounces (or more) Cheddar cheese and mix this with the mashed potatoes; add some pepper and 1/4 tsp. onion powder.
Mix 1 cup cottage cheese with 1 egg or equivalent replacer, and another 1/4 tsp. onion powder.
Melt 1/2 cup butter or margarine (no-salt if necessary) in a small skillet or pot; add 1 small onion, chopped small; cook until onion is soft.

Grease or spray a 9 x 13 inch pan; if you have one with a lid, use that; otherwise you'll have to cover the pan with foil.
Line the bottom of the pan with 1/3 of the noodles.
Cover with cottage cheese mixture.
Cover with second layer of noodles.
Cover with mashed potato mixture.
Cover with third layer of noodles.
Cover with hot cooked onions-margarine/butter mixture.
Cover the pan and bake for 30 minutes.  Let sit 10 minutes before slicing.

What's for supper? Pizza potatoes

Tonight's dinner menu:

Pizza Potatoes: cut-up potatoes, pizza sauce, pepperoni, and cheese, baked in a casserole.  (It's a slow cooker recipe but I didn't start it early enough.). Optional toppings: sliced olives, green peppers.

Carrot sticks

Mango-blueberry-strawberry fruit mix (thawed frozen fruit)

Stuff-mart comes through. Just don't make me go there too often.

We have had W--t stores in Canada for a few years.  They aren't usually my favourite place to shop--too big, too busy.  But there's a newish one near us, and we decided to do our Saturday shopping there for a change.

Luckily, it wasn't very busy.

But wow, that is one overwhelming grocery section, especially when you're used to shopping at a discount supermarket with less choice.  (The Apprentice found it particularly funny that there was one whole side of an aisle devoted to beef jerky, peanuts, and Little Debbies.)  How can there be that much culture shock between stores only a few blocks apart?  It actually felt like we had crossed the border into a U.S. supermarket....or into the Stuff-mart on Veggie Tales. 

"They're in stock! And if you need refrigerators. To keep extra mashed potatoes. Or a giant air compressor. To blow fruit flies off your dresser ..."

And speaking of mashed potatoes, guess what we found there?

We haven't been able to find original, plain, just-potatoes, in-the-box Idahoan mashed potato flakes for quite awhile, ever since Giant Tiger stopped carrying anything except the flavoured pouch varieties.  But there you go--we bought two boxes.

We also found the doll-head-sized beads that Crayons/Dollygirl has been wanting, the exact yarn Mama Squirrel needed for mini monkeys, and a rainbow assortment of tissue paper for crafts and gift wrapping.  Also Sally's Cereals, which were new to us but which seemed like a good deal, $3 for a big bag of plain spoon-sized shredded wheat.  And Habitant soup on sale for a dollar.

Oh--and a package of red candles for our Advent wreath.  (Hoping for pink and purple would have been too much.)

What more could you ask?

What's for supper? Baked potato soup, and a toaster-oven tip

It's Benjamin Britten's birthday. Also Hoagy Carmichael's. I doubt they ever collaborated on anything, so I'm giving them both equal space.





Tonight's menu:

We are trying Baked Potato Soup from A Year of Slow Cooking (halving the recipe and cooking it in the 3 1/2 quart slow cooker--cream cheese was on sale this week!) [Update: Wow, I think we have a new favourite soup.  I did cut back on the cayenne pepper, though.]

with Beer Bread (sorry about the popup there),
Oranges,
and some banana cake/bread that went in the toaster oven after the beer bread was done.

(A tip for toaster-oven bakers:  the biggest dish our current toaster oven can handle is a large casserole dish.  When I'm baking anything too big for an 8-inch or 9-inch square pan, such as a banana bread recipe that normally goes in a 9 x 13-inch pan, I put it in one of the large casseroles and just let it bake longer than normal.  One caution with this: with the pan being so close to the bottom element, the bottom of the cake or bread may get a bit dark before the top gets brown, so check towards the end of baking.)

What's for supper? Slow cooker ranch potatoes

Tonight's dinner menu:

Creamy Ranch Mashed Red Potatoes, from More Make it Fast, Cook It Slow
Mini sausages, peas
Lemon-poppyseed cake made from muffin batter and using up leftover lemon pudding

The potatoes tasted fine, especially with the homemade ranch dressing substitute given in the cookbook; but I didn't cut them small enough and they weren't cooked soft enough to really mash.  So we had Creamy Ranch Cut-up Red Potatoes instead.

What I like about homeschooling (and a thought on instant potatoes)

What I like about homeschooling: that you can CHANGE things if you need to.

It's Friday, we've had a full week, and since I planned out the term's work by days instead of dates, Day 5's work will keep till Monday. This morning we're only going to do math (Ponytails has a DVD lesson to watch, Crayons is doing a placement test) and get ready for this afternoon's co-op. Mama Squirrel has volunteered to do music and a quick craft with the littlest ones, and the Squirrelings will be doing gym and other things with the kids their own ages.

(What's the craft? Take six large, sparkly, star-shaped beads, and seven translucent pony beads. String them on a pipe cleaner and twist the ends together. If you're three years old, leave it at that. If you're old enough, pinch the pipe cleaner in six places, where you put the big beads, to make the points of a snowflake. Use for singing snowflake songs, or hang in the window.)

We're also supposed to be tackling Mount Laundry and putting the rest of the Christmas decorations away (this morning in the Treehouse, not at co-op), but the morning is already going by fast. There was snow to shovel today too.

What's for supper? A pound of stew meat, the end of a bottle of barbecue sauce, and a package of mushrooms. Frozen french fries if we get home early enough, instant mashed potatoes if we don't. (There is only one brand of instant mashed potatoes that I like: Idahoan. It actually tastes like potatoes. I've tried a few others since we temporarily had trouble finding Idahoan, and now I understand why nobody likes instant potatoes. I didn't get paid to say that, it's just one squirrel's opinion.)

Cauliflower, not too complicated

Cauliflower is one of those vegetables I buy when it's reasonably priced but then have to find something to do with that will get eaten in one meal. Because leftover cauliflower--ugh. Unless maybe it's soup, and even that's sometimes hard to pull off successfully. It's the smell, you know?

Here's one easy way to cook it (raw cauliflower, that is) that's good for using up other leftovers as well. This is what I did:

Cut up one medium-sized cauliflower, put in a large greased casserole.
Add some cut-up cooked chicken and sliced cooked potatoes.
Add milk around the edges (how much, I can't say--think scalloped potatoes)
Add a blob of butter or margarine on top
Sprinkle with any cauliflower-compatible seasonings. (I had a homemade salt-free cajun-type mix; plain paprika would work too.)
Bake, covered, until the cauliflower is tender and the potatoes and chicken are heated through.
You shouldn't need to thicken the sauce if you've used a medium amount of milk--the potatoes will soak a lot of it up.

What do you call this one? The Apprentice suggested "Chicken Chowder Casserole." Or maybe Scalloped Vegetables with Chicken?