Potatoes

Well, I’m glad I did it that way. Which was to make the potato dish tonight rather than with our Easter dinner tomorrow night. We’re having a spiral cut ham. Yum. And, I wanted to have potatoes au gratin. That’s the way my mother always used to do it and that’s what I wanted to have. Except I’ve always made them from the box. Only once, years ago did I attempt to make them from scratch. I can’t remember how they turned out, but seeing as how I didn’t repeat that particular move I can only say they must not have been very good.

So, today at the grocery store I thought how hard could it be? I bought the fixings for home made potatoes au gratin. I figured this was scalloped potatoes with cheese. While I’m in line I asked the lady in front of me if she knew how to make them from scratch. She said, “Oh, I always make them for him. He likes them fine.” Him was her husband who was ahead of her in line. So, she told me. Cut the potatoes real thin, like you were going to make potato chips. Then, she said to layer potatoes, thinly sliced onion, sprinkle with salt and pepper, sprinkle with some flour, dot with butter and then start in with your next layer. She said after it was all layered up you should pour in some milk and bake it for an hour until it was done.

Okay, so I decided to do a test-run tonight. I did as she said. She said she doesn’t measure anything. I gave it a whirl. She had also said she’d never tried it with cheese, so I did one of each. I used my small sized loaf pans with 2 russet potatoes and 1 onion. I guess I used up most of one stick of butter between the 2 pans and I don’t know how much milk I poured in; enough to see it all rise to the surface. One of the layers in one pan was cheese. So that one was the au gratin potatoes and the other was to be the scalloped potatoes.

They baked and bubbled and smelled wonderful. Except when you spooned into it the sauce was real runny and lumpy and that’s where it looked a mess. DeeDude tried some of each and said they were both great and we should just save them and have them with our Easter dinner. I looked askance at him and returned to the kitchen. I mean this looked horrible. The worser one to clump was the one with the cheese in it, but that was the one to brown up the best.

What, you might ask, did I do?

I hauled forth yea olde food processer and set to pulsing. Pulsed the whole lot of it into a smooth, really thick, potato soup that I thinned out with some water. Tasted fine and I decided that I will use that tomorrow night to pour between new layers of thinly sliced potatoes and onions. No clumping up because it will have already been blended and cooked and I feel it will be fine.

In future? If this tastes good I will make it this way from now on. If not I will make a white sauce and then use that to pour over the layers of onions and potatoes.