Dairy-free, fluffy mashed potatoes

While you can make mashed potatoes by simply smashing up your potatoes the fluffy, creamy potatoes that many of us are accustomed to eating usually involves some kind of dairy - butter, milk, cream or actually in my family, we really like to add cream cheese to ours.

The dairy really transforms them into another dish. So, how do you make them dairy free but still decadently delicious? Well, you might think I am crazy but coconut milk or more specifically, coconut cream. The creamy/solid part of a can of full-fat coconut milk.

I promise you will not taste coconut in these potatoes at all. It's amazing to me how close the taste is the dairy laden potatoes of my childhood.

Ingredients

2 lbs potatoes, diced into 1" cubes, peeled if desired or not

1 can full-fat coconut milk

2 Tbl ghee

Spices - whatever you like in your mashed potatoes, I use garlic, salt and pepper.

Cooking equipment: potato masher or hand mixer

Boil your potatoes until they are soft in enough water to cover them, about 20 minutes. Drain the water and add the coconut milk using only the solid coconut cream, reserving the liquid from the can. Add the ghee and spices to your taste. Mash the potatoes, I use my kitchen aid hand mixer to mash. If the potatoes are too thick you can use some of liquid from the can or additional ghee until they are your desired consistency.

I like to mix a little extra ghee in when I eat them too. :)

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Potato Pancetta soup in the instant pot

This was my first time winging it for the instant pot! I felt brave. It was delicious.

It was loosely based on a crockpot potato soup I've been making for years but now adjusted for my instant pot!

I took this photo before putting cheese on top!

1-2 TB of olive oil

1/2 tsp of chopped garlic (I use the jar kind, like this)

8 oz of pancetta (2 packages)

5-6 russet potatoes, cut into 1/2 inch cubes (you can use another kind but you might need more if they are smaller)

1 quart of chicken broth

1/2 head of broccoli chopped (could omit if you don't like it, I added it to sneak in some veggies)

1/4 tsp of celery seed

pepper to taste (I didn't add salt because the pancetta is salty, you can if you want it saltier)

4 oz of cream cheese, cut into small cubes

cheddar cheese for garnish (optional but yummy!)

Directions:

Turn on your instant pot and set to saute on high temperature. Add olive oil to pot and when it's warm add the garlic. Saute garlic for 1-2 minutes and add pancetta. Cook the pancetta 5-7 minutes until fully cooked. Add the chicken broth, potatoes, broccoli, celery seed and pepper to the pot. Ensure there is enough liquid to cover the contents of the pot and if not add additional broth or water. Turn the instant pot to pressure cook on high temperature and set the time for 12 minutes. Make sure the vent is set to sealing.

After the pressure cooking is finished do a quick pressure release. When the pressure has released, change the pot back to saute and add the cubes of cream cheese, stirring as you do so. Allow soup to simmer for 4-5 minutes to melt the cream cheese into the soup, then serve with shredded cheese on top!

Note: I used a 6 qt instant pot.

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Roasted rosemary potatoes

I also made rosemary potatoes with my windfall of free herbs. Rosemary is delicious on roasted vegetables, or chicken and very tasty in bread. All fresh bread should have rosemary! Too bad I don't have time to make any.

Making these potatoes is very simple. Chop a potatoes into evenly sized pieces, put in a baking dish. Coat lightly with olive oil and sprinkle with fresh rosemary, pepper and salt. Bake at 350 to 400 for about 45 minutes, or until tender. They can be baked at just about any temp, it will only take more or less time for them to be ready, making it easy to make them while also using the oven to make something else.

Potato soup - crock pot success!

Finally, finally, finally, the crock pot comes through. After all the depressing crock pot outcomes, I was on the look out for a specialist and I was browsing around on $5 dinners when I saw a post by Stephanie O'Dea, aka slow cooker aficionado. Stephanie's blog, A Year of Slow Cooking is amazing. She has a small slow cooker obsession, but I'm grateful for it, and challenged herself to use her crock pot everyday for a year in 2008. Wow. I can't even challenge myself to cook everyday - partly because I wouldn't be able to eat all of the food.

Anyway, so after I found Stephanie's blog, my hopes were still pretty low and I thought it was perhaps best to start small. Soup seemed like a natural thing to make in a slow cooker so I looked at the soup recipes on her blog and I wasn't disappointed there are a bunch to choose from.

I made the potato soup. It was yummy. I sort of forgot to buy seasoned salt, uh, twice so I used some random mix of seasoning I had around including paprika. I tried to blend the soup smooth with a hand mixer because unlike Stephanie, I did want a smooth soup. It sort of worked but not really. She suggested using a hand blender but I don't have one and did not want to pour the soup into my standing blender.

One final note, this is not single-girl portion sized recipe, at all! Probably because Stephanie is cooking for a family. I was planning to make the whole recipe and put some in the freezer but then I started cutting up potatoes, and let me tell you 5lbs of potatoes is a lot. I would recommend you to cut it in half. If you decide to make the whole thing, make sure to use a 6qt slow cooker as the recipe recommends. My crock pot is 5qt and it was almost full with 3/4 of the recipe.

I would say the full recipe makes 10-12 servings. I was eating this most of the week...yea none made it to the freezer, probably for the best as there is still some chicken in there from the whole chicken recipe.

The recipe calls for chicken broth, but I suspect a vegetarian version could easily be made by substituting vegetable broth.

I'm planning to make the End of Summer Harvest soup next week.

Cook it slow, eat it fast!

I'm really excited, I just got a crock pot! I had a crock pot in college and used it all of about 4 times but it got broken when I moved to DC. Ever since I've been seeing all these fabulous looking crock pot recipes and thinking how nice it would be to have one waiting for me after work. So, after Christmas I headed over to Bed Bath & Beyond and bought one. Now, I have to use it.

This week I made scalloped potatoes from the recipe book that came with it - only three more times and I'll beat my old record! I changed the recipe a bit and it really did not work out so I'm going to put up the original and mine - make at your own risk.


Original Recipe

1/2 cup margarine/butter
1/2 cup onion, chopped
1 16oz package of frozen hash browns
1 can of cream of mushroom soup
1 1/2 cup of milk
1 cup cheddar cheese
1 small green pepper chopped
1 cup cheese cracker crumbs

Lightly grease crock pot. Stir together the margarine, onions, hash browns, soup, milk, cheese, green pepper and 1/2 cup of crack crumbs. Top with remaining cracker crumbs. Cover and cook on high 3-4 hours.

Lacey Version

1/2 cup margarine/butter
3-4 sliced potatoes
1 can of cheddar cheese soup
1 1/2 cup of milk
1 cup cheddar cheese
1 small green pepper chopped
1 cup bread crumbs

So when reading this, I thought fabulous idea - slow cooked scallop potatoes but why use frozen hash browns when I could use fresh potatoes? I don't like mushrooms, so I though hey extra cheese and I omitted the onions because I'm not a fan. I also subbed bread crumbs for cracker crumbs. I cooked it on low for about 8 hours because I wanted to make it while I was at work. What I got was a mediocre, slightly over cooked, somewhat greasy, cheesy mess. Well, it did not taste that bad really but I'm not going to make it again.

I would say using the cheddar cheese soup instead of a cream base is where I went wrong. Using something like cream of potato would probably have worked out alright. I'm also wondering if I put it on the warm setting for the entire day instead of the low if it would be cooked enough but not burnt around the edges.

It anyone tries to make the original version, let me know how it turns out! Hopefully, the next crock pot adventure will be more successful.

A potato as a meal

The credit for this one goes entirely to my friend Jess. She is actually in culinary school now, honing her skills. Anyway, she came to visit me once and I had nothing to feed her, or I couldn't figure out what to make with it anyway and she whipped this up and it was tasty! Now I make it all the time.

I had a random assortment of veggies, potatoes and some bacon pieces. My old grocery store sold bacon chopped up into little cubes, it was amazing and I used it all the time but alas, where I live now they don't sell it that way, just in the customary strips. Sigh.

This recipe is great for a number of reasons, you can use just about whatever is in the fridge, it's great for lunch the next day, uses very little or no meat (ie it's cheap and healthy), only one pan needed! So, without further ado...

Baked potato with roasted veggie topping

2 large baking potatoes (1 for dinner, 1 for lunch the next day)
3-4 cups of chopped veggies (can use anything - broccoli, summer squash, fresh green beans, tomatoes, bell pepper...)
splash red wine vinegar
Italian seasoning
splash olive oil
shredded cheese (anything - mozz, feta, cheddar)
chicken or bacon, cut up (optional)
salt and pepper to taste

Bake the potatoes. I usually microwave them for about 5-8 minutes and then cook them the rest of the way in the oven, while I prep the veggies. Splash some olive oil into a small pan. If you are using meat chop up the bacon or chicken into small pieces and put it in the pan first, sprinkle with Italian seasoning and cook it for 3-5 minutes on medium heat (little longer for chicken) until it's almost cooked. Then add the veggies (if using tomatoes add them a few minutes later) and pour a splash of red wine vinegar and a bit more Italian seasoning and some salt and pepper. Split cooked potatoes, top with veggies and finish with cheese. et Volia!


Cost: A+
Waste: A+
Taste: B

Simple scalloped potatoes - from Japan?

This recipe is from a Japanese cookbook. No...I don't speak Japanese. My neighbor when I lived in Holland, Sachi, was Japanese. She was also interested in experimental cooking used to make recipes from a "modern" Japanese cookbook, which were mostly sort of a Japanese take on western food. There was also a recipe for kind of an egg plant-tempura-lasagna, which was fabulous and I've never made but might try it sometime...

So this recipe is very approximate, given my aforementioned ignorance of Japanese.

2-3 large potatoes
about 1 cup cream (or half & half)
cheese
2-3 Tb butter
bread crumbs
salt & pepper

Slice the potatoes, making sure to slice them all into a similar size. Place in a pot and cover with water. Cook on high heat for 10-15 until almost cooked (cooking them partially on the stove cuts down the oven cooking time significantly). Place the semi-cooked potatoes in a baking pan and cover about half-way with cream. You can use half & half to make it a little healthier (and cheaper) but you will need to bake it a little longer so that it thickens. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Sprinkle about 1 cup of cheese over the top (you can use just about anything, in Holland we used Gouda, today I used Colby Jack) and put a tablespoon of butter in 2 or 3 different places, top with bread crumbs and bake.


So, on our oven in Holland you could not adjust the temp (challenge), in short you want to bake it until the cream reduces and thickens. Today (my first time making this in the US) I baked it at 350 for 20 min and another 20 min at 250. I'd say bake it longer at a lower temp in general.

I was a little heavy handed with the bread crumbs this time, but still tasty! This is also excellent the next day, better I think actually.