Crispy Bacon and Cheese Potato Pancakes

Sometimes in the wee hours of the morning, my stomach starts talking to my brain.  In this half dream state, somehow my stomach tells my brain what it wants and my subconscious brain starts cataloging what I already have in the kitchen so by the time I woke up this morning, I had a plan and a list of ingredients.

Here's what I cooked up.  Literally.

Grab yourself some:

Bacon (or ham if you want. Or no meat for veggie version)

leftover mashed potatoes (about 2 cups)

4 small pre-cooked potatoes (either baked or microwaved)

sour cream or Salvadorean Crema

1 egg

shredded cheddar cheese

seasoning salt

pepper

I just happened to have some bacon.  Okay.  Let's just be frank.  For me, that's like saying I breath air.

On medium heat in a skillet, I threw down as many slices I could fit.  I let that begin to crisp up and moved on to the potatoes.

Someone gave me these left over garlic cheese mashed potatoes.  They sat in my fridge for a bit because no matter how good mashed potatoes were when you cooked them, cold leftover ones are kind of dry and not very inspiring.  Until NOW!  I would guess this is about 2 cups?  (These were not my recipe.  I have a sour cream garlic mashed potato recipe that I will eventually post.  During Thanksgiving, I use an entire Costco sized bag of potatoes to make a Gi-normo batch.  True story.).

I also used 4 small potatoes that I had microwaved and had cooled down.  I use the skin in this recipe so I made sure to give them a good scrub down to get all the dirt off.

In a large mixing bowl, I added my cold, leftover garlic, cheese mashed potatoes.  To that I added my small microwaved potatoes.  I used my hand to just obliterate them.  I use my hands a lot.  It's easier, faster and more efficient.  Plus its a great stress reliever. Grrrrrr! Smash!

And more Grrrrr! Smash!

Now I add some seasoning salt.

And don't forget black pepper too.

By now, my bacon looks like this and it's almost done.  When they are all crispy, set aside and turn the heat off. 

I used a heaping tablespoon of this Salvadorean Cream.  It's a richer, thicker sour cream.  I adore it.  The ladies at my work showed me how to slather it on Central American bread rolls called bolillos.  It is divine.  You can plop it on top of refried black beans or use it in place of mayo.  I use it for my Green Hulk sauce.  If I didn't have any on hand, I would use sour cream.  I added it to ensure my potato pancakes were creamy and not dry. Well and because I wanted it to taste good too. 

Plop it in there! 

Add one egg to your potato mixture.

I added about half a cup of shredded sharp cheddar cheese.  You could leave the cheese out if you wanted.

I mixed it all up and it looked like this:

Do you know what time it is?????? It's time for BACON!!! I used 4ish slices for this.  I say it's approximate because some of it may or may not have gone missing during this process.  I just used my hands again to crush it all up since my bacon was nice and crispy.  I'm too lazy to pull out the cutting board and knife sometimes. It wouldn't kill me if I didn't have to do extra dishes.  Plus the bacon fat leaves my hands nice and soft.  Just kidding.  I didn't super crush them.  I left them in pretty good sized pieces because I wanted to bite into nice chunks of bacon while I was eating these.  You decide how big or small you want the bacon chunks.  I was thinking slices of ham would go well in here too.  

So while I was making up the potato mixture, I kept looking at the bacon grease sitting there off to the side.  And while I hadn't intended to use it when I first started dreaming this up, I couldn't help but thinking about it.  You don't have to use the bacon grease.  Originally, I thought I was going to use olive oil.  But it kept looking at me so I thought, "What the hell!" and gave in.

I poured my bacon grease into a large non-stick skillet.  Yes.  I did.  I admit it.  I did it.

I turned the heat up to medium and started working on shaping my potato cakes.

I used a HEAPING spoonful.  It was a good handful.  Using your hands, roll into a tight ball and then smash down carefully into a flattened hockey puck like shape.  Use your fingers to seal in the edges.  You don't want your pancake to come undone and lose it's guts while you're frying them up.

It looks sort of like a biscuit.  See how I was careful to press the edges in so they are smooth?

Try to work quickly because they will be easier to work with when cool.  As you roll them and shape them with your hands, they start to warm up and they become harder to keep together.

I was able to get 6 good sized potato pancakes formed.  You can do smaller if you'd like.  They would make yummy party appetizers if you wanted to make them bite-sized.  But I wanted them larger so I could build a breakfast entree with them so I made mine this size so each pancake would be one serving.

By this time, my bacon grease was nice and hot, but not smoking.  If your oil or bacon grease is smoking then it's too hot and you'll burn the outside before the inside gets a chance to cook through.  I carefully laid them into the bacon grease and it looked like this:

You'll be tempted to flip them because they smell realllllly good.  But if you want them to be crispy, be patient and let them really fry up.  I would guess about 6-7 minutes is how long I waited before carefully flipping them over.

Give the other side the same amount of time to crisp up too.

I let them cool just a bit before plating up.  They "firm" up a bit as they cool.  I topped with a poached egg and another slice of bacon.  This one was for the Indian guy I live with because he's nice and I like him.

I ate mine without extra bacon and I was perfectly fine (Don't feel sorry for me.  I ate bacon as I was making this too).  I also drizzled some Green Hulk Sauce on mine, but I ate it before I remembered I should take a pic.  Oops. 

One thing that I wished that I had done was to add finely minced onion into the potato mixture before rolling into pucks and frying up.  I think the finely minced onion would have been divine in this.  So the next time I make this, I will most def use onion.  I guess my awake self doesn't always get the complete memo from asleep, dreaming of food self.