Baked Potato Bites

Seeing as how I have them listed as my favorite food, it’s about time I made something baked potato related.  And with just over a week left until the Super Bowl, I thought I’d make it another fabulous finger food recipe. 

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 4 good sized russet potatoes
• 2 Tablespoons butter
• 2 Tablespoons olive oil
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• ¼ teaspoon pepper
• Cheese
• Sour Cream
• Chives

These come together really quickly, so go ahead and preheat your oven to 400°.  After that, wash your potatoes, scrubbing them thoroughly, dry them, and put them aside.  Melt your butter.  It shouldn’t take more than 10 – 15 seconds in the microwave.  Add the olive oil.  (hint: 4 Tablespoons = ¼ cup, so if you melt your 2 tablespoons of butter in a measuring cup, you can just add olive oil up to the ¼ cup mark) 

Add the salt and pepper.

Stir that all together and pour about a tablespoon of it onto a sheet pan. 

Spread that around to coat the pan. 

Now for the potatoes.  Cut off both ends and discard them. 

Slice the rest of the potato into ½ inch slices. 

Place the slices into a plastic bag and pour over the remaining butter mixture. 

Inflate the bag, and shake until every slice is coated on both sides. 

Dump the slices onto the prepared pan. 

Spread them out leaving a little space between each one. 

Bake them for 15 minutes.  When you pull them out, they won’t be changing on top yet, but they should be just starting to brown on the bottom. 

Go ahead and flip them all over and then it’s back into the oven for another 15 minutes.  They should be looking and smelling fabulous. 

Flip them over again, and top each one with a little bit of grated cheese.  I like to use a really sharp cheddar, but you can really use whatever you like.  Just make sure you don’t get carried away with it.  These are supposed to be finger food so you don’t want them totally covered with melted cheese.  (Is this the part where I admit to being wrong when I said there's no such thing as too much cheese?) 

Back into the oven just until the cheese is melted.  It’ll only take 3 or 4 minutes. 

You may have noticed that I’ve only got 8 slices on the pan for this step.  I put the rest aside to cool and then into the fridge.  You can do the same, and when you’re ready, just pull them out of the fridge and heat them for a few minutes in the oven before adding the cheese. 

Once the cheese is melted, move the potatoes to whatever you’re going to serve them on. 

Top each one with sour cream.  I piped mine on just for that added touch, but a dollop would work just fine. 

Sprinkle on some fresh chives and you have baked potato perfection in a bit size (well, maybe 2 bites) package. 

Crisp and buttery on the outside and lusciously soft within, topped with salty cheese, tangy sour cream and just a touch of oniony chive, it’s everything you love about a baked potato, but easier, faster, and well… better. 

Ravens or 49ers?  Who do you think is going to win? 

appetizers and breakfast

I am a great fan of multi-purpose things.

My couch is also a bed. My coffee table is also storage. My appetizers are also breakfast.

I haven't been able to find a local bakery that makes good sausage rolls. In fact, of all the bakeries I've been to, I found only one that had sausage rolls. They weren't very good. I mean really, how can you mess up something that is basically "pigs in a blanket"?

I'm most familiar with sausage rolls eaten at lunch or as an afternoon snack, with tea. But I've also had small versions of them as cocktail foods. And since I'm somewhat recently enamoured with biscuits and sausage gravy, I figure we may as well have them for breakfast too.

Because really, who wants to make breakfast the morning after a cocktail party. Or a family Christmas party.... I need cocktails for those.

Sausage Rolls

What you need:

• Biscuit dough!
• Sausage
• ...
• that's basically it
• but dijon mustard is tasty
• and egg wash makes them pretty (one egg with half a shell's worth of water beaten in)

(but of course, there is no egg in the picture)

What you gotta do:

Make yourself a batch of biscuit dough. I'm going to do these rolls two ways, so I've divided mine in half and rolled out one of the halves into a rectangle that's about 10 inches long and 4 inches wide.

For the first batch, I'm going to start with raw sausage. Whatever kind you like best. These came from a local deli/grocery that makes their own sausages, usually with local pigs. If you have time and want to dirty another bowl, you can mix in some breadcrumbs and extra seasoning (sage, parsley, thyme). I opted to go bare bones with my sausage and just brush the dough with a bit of grainy dijon mustard.

Bust open a sausage and place a thumb-thick strip of sausage a little closer to one edge.

I brushed a bit of egg wash on the inside of the dough before I rolled it up.

Slice the roll into 10 pieces that are about 1 inch wide each and once they're on a baking sheet, brush them with more egg wash. 

Into a 400 degree oven they go. Mine's been preheating this whole time. Has yours?

And since my biscuits tend to rise quite a bit...

Some of them toppled, but 25 minutes later they came out looking just fine.

Now, if you've got some leftover sausage, or if you don't want to deal with the raw, you can do this all with cooked sausage.

Again, roll out a piece of biscuit dough. This one didn't quite make it into being rectangular. Close enough.

The mustard and egg wash go on first, then the sausage. I cut into the sausage in a couple places so that it would lay a little straighter.

Roll, slice, eggwash.

This time, I baked a little hotter, 425 degrees which is typical for biscuits, and only left them in for 20 minutes.

These, with a bit of gravy on top... breakfast.

Or dipped into a little more dijon... appetizers.

What's your favourite multi-purpose food?