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.

SRLA Breakfast Burritos

"I run therefore I eat."

Yeah.  That's my running mantra.  Remember when I said I finished my first marathon because I promised myself I could eat bacon when I was done?  True story.  I wasn't lying. You can read about it here.

I used to run with Students Run LA. Have you ever heard of them?  It's a great organization that works with urban at risk youth.  Their mission is to have middle and high school students train and run the Los Angeles Marathon (that's 26.2 MILES...all in one shot).  It's a great opportunity for mentors and students alike.  I have completed two marathons with this organization.  I can't put into words my experience of running for myself and with and for my students (and trust me...I'm NEVER at a loss for words.  But here I really am).

Here's some more info if you're interested:

Students Run LA 

Every year 3,000 students participate in our program!

Inspiring at-risk youth to achieve their dreams through a life-transforming experience:
The training for, and completion of, the ASICS LA Marathon. 

 Once the kids and I started logging in 10 or more miles during practice long runs, I started noticing how HUNGRY we all were after we were done.  Actually, FAMISHED is really more accurate of a word to describe how you feel after running 10 or more miles. You can't eat before the run, unless you want to barf it all up during your long run... So I started making these burritos for us to eat after we finished.

The kids still talk about them all the time.  I think they get more hype because after running between 10 and 18 miles, even my shoe would taste good. These burritos most def got me though all of the long runs.  It also helped to reassure me that my kids were going to be okay.  If they could eat a burrito, they weren't going to die from the run even though some of them (myself included) complained like we were dying.

When I make these off season, I use fresh potatoes, but when making 20+ burritos at a time, I cheat and use frozen hash browns.  I like them both. I happened to have some frozen hash browns left over from making crack casserole for Superbowl so here's the frozen hash brown version.  You can also use these easy to make home fries.

This is the recipe for the potato GUTS of the SRLA burrito.

You need:
1 onion
1 jalapeno
1 bell pepper
frozen hash browns
olive oil
seasoning salt
pepper

For the burrito you need:
tortillas
shredded cheese
sliced ham
sour cream (optional)
scrambled egg (optional)

In a skillet on medium, begin to saute your chopped onion, bell pepper and jalapeno (I call this trio the Holy Trinity of cooking.  I use it A LOT when cooking.) in olive oil.  If you don't like spicy, then leave out the jalapeno...but it's soooooo good with it in there.  Give it a try.  Cut off the tip of the jalapeno (stem-side) and give it a quick lick to see how spicy your jalapeno is...If it's a fire bomb, just use half.  Or scrape out some of the capsaicin (seeds and white membrane).  Or just throw caution to the wind and throw it all in there!!

Season with black pepper and seasoning salt.

I had some leftover spam so I chopped it up and added.  But this is optional.  When making the burrito, I use thin sliced ham so I don't usually add spam.

Add to your skillet and continue to saute on medium.

When all your veggies are soft,  add your frozen hash browns.  This was about HALF of a three pound bag of frozen hash browns that I bought at Smart and Final.

Pour 'em in!

Instead of adding oil at this point, I add about half a cup of water (or more to prevent sticking and to help with steaming the frozen hash browns).

I generously season again to make sure my hash browns get yummy too.

Cover with a lid and remember to stir up every few minutes.  These suckers were done in about 10 minutes (after adding the frozen hash browns).

In a separate frying pan, I scrambled up some eggs.  When I make these during SRLA season, I used up to 2 dozen eggs....yeah.  I don't know how to describe what that's like.  It's kind of surreal.  I also scramble this many eggs when feeding 4 of my Indian brother out laws....just saying. Cluck!  Use about one egg per person or 1 egg for every 2 small burritos or 1 egg for every 1 large burrito.
Set your cooked eggs aside.

Time to wrap 'em up!

During SRLA season, I use burrito size tortillas, but off season I make them smaller, I use soft taco sized tortillas like these ones:

I slap them down on the counter and make a burrito assembly line:

Then I add a handful of cheese:

Then a scoopful of hash brown mix:

Then add a scoopful of scrambled eggs and a few slices of thin sliced ham.  I don't have pictures of the egg and ham because sometimes, the fat girl in me just likes potato and cheese and that's what I made this round.  I also added a scoop of sour cream just because I didn't think they were decadent or fatty enough.

Roll 'em up!

Sometimes, I get greedy as I'm making these and over fill.  Then they look like this:

 But don't worry.  This fat, ugly one found a home.....in MY BELLY!

If you over filled and are finding it's too hard to roll into a burrito, you can fold it over and make a fat taco. Yaaaaaaay! FAT TACO!!!!!!!!!!! A FAT POTATO TACO!!! Ohmygosh.  I just got really excited.  You'll have to excuse me.

This recipe will probably make a dozen or more mini burritos or roughly 8 large burritos (depending on how much you put in there).  You don't have to roll them into burritos.  You can serve in a bowl with cheese and topped with sour cream.  Or you can eat them right out of the skillet with a spoon while wearing stretchy pants....in the privacy of your own home.  Just sayin'.

I make in bulk, plastic wrap them up and keep them in the fridge.  I use them as currency to bribe people.  It's super easy to throw the plastic wrapped burrito into the microwave and nuke them in the morning.  You can make enough at one shot to last you all week for breakfast (or as a fat girl snack at night).  I also like to eat these suckers with all purpose green Hulk sauce.

 

SRLA 2012-2013