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.  

Potato Peel Chips

Here's a quick recipe for using potato peelings instead of throwing them away.
Unless you compost....which I don't.  So my version of composting is to eat them...

All you need are:

clean potato peels

olive oil

seasonings of your choice

Here's a neat little trick to using potato peels.  All you have to do is to be sure to give them a good scrub to get off all the dirt.  Then peel as you normally would.  Sometimes, I'll peel them a bit thicker so I can have a more substantial "chip", but you don't have to.

Here's another little trick, if you're only using a potato or two, you can put the peels in a container, fill with water, and keep in the fridge until you peel more potatoes for baking into chips.  I wouldn't keep them in the fridge for longer than a week.   If you do, I guess you should change the water.

So here's a batch I made using half potato peels stored in the fridge in cold water and half from fresh peels I had from making beef stew.   After baking, I didn't notice a marked difference in the chips.  The only way I could tell the difference is that the ones stored in cold water in the fridge were slightly curled. 

I made sure to rinse the peels in cold water and dried on a paper towel.  You don't have to worry about them being completely dry, but you do want to shake off most of the water.  

In a shallow pan, I took my clean potato peels and tossed in some olive oil.  Just enough to coat all my peels and to help with getting the seasoning salt and pepper to stick. 

Then, using my hands, I just tossed everything around until every peel got a nice coat of oil and seasoning.

Then I threw the pan into a pre-heated oven at 450 degrees.  Bake for 15 minutes.  

To ensure even cooking, give them a toss around and bake for another 10 minutes or so.  Be careful to check them.  You don't want them to burn, which they do fairly easily since they are so thin.  

I like to dip them in my all purpose Green Hulk Sauce or sour cream or Green Sauce AND sour cream. The Indian likes to smother them in ketchup.   You can eat these as a snack or as a side to burgers.  This counts as recycling, right?

I also like to do a nacho version that looks like this:

Just take your potato peel chips and melt cheese on them.  Top with sour cream, chopped tomatoes and sliced jalapenos.  Mmmmmmm. 

Jalapeno Cheese Cornbread Muffins

Some people call me the Space Cowboy....Oops.  I mean some people call these suckers Mexican Cornbread Muffins.  I'm not sure if they came from mexico or people just call them that because they have jalapenos and cheese in 'em...I dunno.  Shrug.

I got invited to a Fat Tuesday Dinner and this is what I'm bringing.  Let's just call these Jalapeno Cheese Cornbread Muffins because guess what?  They have jalapenos and cheese in them!  BOING!

Here's the guest list:

1-2 jalapenos, finely diced
4 eggs
1 stick o'butter
1 can of creamed corn (the one I used was 14.75 oz)
1 cp of corn meal
1 cp of flour
3/4 cp of sugar
1-2 cps of shredded cheddar cheese
4 tsp of baking soda

Here's my jalapeno.  I used one for this recipe because I promised my friend Matt that I'd bring something to dinner that isn't spicy.  Our friend Anna (who is an amazing cook and taught me how to make jambalaya) is hosting dinner tonight and she tends to make everything spicy. Like you're going to be on fire kind of spicy. Yay for me.  Boo for poor Matt.  You can use 2 or even 3 jalapenos or more if your name is Anna and you like everything spicy.  (Anna once competed in the BCD spicy tofu challenge!  You can see footage of it and her right here!  I'm very proud of you, Anna).

Here's jalapeno and it is sitting next to butter. 

 They are friends and they really like each other.

In a  frying pan, melt your butter on medium/medium-low.

When it's all melted (or almost all melted...I got impatient) add your finely diced jalapenos.  Add pepper....

And salt....(why yes. My salt shaker is a tiny milk can and I adore it.)

Saute your jalapenos in the butter on medium low so you don't burn your butter and your jalapenos don't get crispy.  We just want them soft.  Look dancing jalapenos!!  Turn off after about 3-5 minutes.  Now you have jalapeno butter.  Let it cool off to the side somewhere.

In a large mixing bowl, add 3/4 cup of sugar and beat in your eggs.

Here's what it looks like after you beat the sugar and eggs together.  My fork fell in while I was taking the picture...that's the dangers of working alone with just your cell phone camera.  Don't worry.  I saved it.  No forks were harmed in the making of this recipe.

Add in your entire can of creamed corn. Liquid and all.  All of it.  Just pour the whole thing in there,  Right there.  In there.  Yes.

Add 1-2 cups of shredded, sharp cheddar cheese.  I used 2.  You can too.

Now it's time to add your jalapeno butter.

Mix it up. Now it should look like this.  Set this pot of gold off to the side.

In a different mixing bowl, add in your dry ingredients.  

One cup of corn meal.  I used yellow.  You can use white if you want.  Same same. Add to that one cup of flour.

Then grab this stuff.

Add 4 teaspoons of baking powder in with the corn meal and flour.

I don't add any salt since there's a lot of cheese in there.  But you can if you want.  Sift it all together and make sure its all incorporated.  This is kind of important.  I'm not really much of a baker.  I usually can't be bothered to measure things out and mix in different bowls.  But I learned the hard way that its really important.

A loooooong time ago (but in this galaxy), I once decided I was going to send my friend Paulie a care package.  I decided to bake cornbread muffins because it looked fairly easy using the Jiffy Mix.  I was too lazy and couldn't be bothered with separating the dry and the wet ingredients and just threw it all in the same bowl.  Well, he called me to tell me got the package and he really appreciated it, but he wanted to know why the corn bread muffins had pockets of dry powder in them.   

Oh. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!  Okay.  Lesson learned.

I just used a fork to sift it all together.  Some people put it through a sieve.  That's just too much work for me.  So fork it is.

Now take your dry ingredients and add to your wet ingredients.

After it's all mixed together, it looks like this and I have to remind myself that there's raw egg in it or I'll start to try and eat it as is.

You can use muffin liners to prevent the muffins from sticking to your muffin pan or I like to just drizzle a little bit of olive oil into each muffin cup.  I add more than what's shown in this picture.  Or you can butter your muffin pan.  Or you can use that spray stuff.  Up to you.

Then I spoon the muffin mix into the muffin pan.

Bake at 300 for 50 minutes.

You end up with dense, moist, and delicious muffins.

Here's a pic of the muffin with a very interested party in the background.