'Tis that lovely time of year where everyone gorges themselves silly on turkey (or ham) with all the trimmings! Spend time with our friends and family, have fun holiday memories (or nightmares). Either way, it's a four day weekend! Ha!
This year, we'll be spending Thanksgiving day with some friends of ours since it's going to be their last one in Belgium. Everyone that's coming was asked to bring food since it sounds like there's quite a few people attending, which is totally OK since that's not really fair to expect the host to cook that much (roughly thirty!). So, I volunteered to bring "Bacon Mashed Potatoes". When I mentioned to Eric that's what I was going to make, his eyes dilated and he started salivating. Heavily.
Thing is, the most I've cooked for is ten people..so I have a challenge making enough mashed potatoes for thirty people, including if someone wants to be a piggy and get more. I'm hoping I'll have SOME left over considering we're gonna do our own Thanksgiving on Friday. Eric INSISTS that we have a turkey. Fine and dandy.. I was thinking along the lines of a young turkey or something (8ish pounds). Eric picks out a 19lber. Trickeration, I say!
Today's energy is going to be invested in making the bacon potatoes since yesterday I the majority of the day to clean potatoes and mushrooms. When I pick up potatoes from the Commissary, they're normally already scrubbed down and washed..so all I have to do is a quick wash once I get them home. Well. I guess since potatoes are in such high demand right now, they ran out of their usual potato sacks and got some from the local economy. Doesn't sound all that bad till you realize all the potatoes are straight out of the ground. Not scrubbed. Still have clumps of dirt spackled to them. Fun stuff.
The mammoth size stockpot I gotta use to make all of the potatoes. Scary thing is, I have TWO of these! You're looking at a 42 quart stock pot. We originally bought these from Wal-Mart back in California, but you can find them on GSI Outdoors ....Side note: We didn't pay nearly what they're asking for (we got these about 2 years ago).
The stock pot with about 15lbs of potatoes:
All of the lovely mushrooms (roughly 3lbs):
I tend to peel the skins off of 'em, despite washing them and what not. It's easier than to scrub scrub scrub and feel like you didn't get all the poopy soil off of it. Sorry, but mushrooms are grown in super poop saturated soil. Just sayin'!
One with and one without the skin:
Chopped up:
Eric dealt with the onions, LOL. I would've taken pictures of them but they were burning my eyes far to much to try to focus the camera on it. They were potent lil things!
Since the main ingredient in the recipe is bacon, I ended up buying four packs of extra thick cut bacon. I didn't wanna stand in front of the stove top all morning frying them, so we resorted to using my stoneware bar pan (works VERY well and helps to season it even further!) and stuck them in the oven ( 375* for 22 minutes). I'm sure you're probably thinking that the pan looks gross, but it's supposed to be brown like that (aside from the grease). The darker the pan, the more seasoned it is. I've seen some to where they're almost black!
Once the bacon was done, I chopped the strips up into smaller pieces:
When the first two batches of bacon was done, we poured the excess grease into our stir fry pan since we were wanting to use some to fry up the onion and mushrooms:
Toss in the onions and let 'em cook till they're soft, then add in the mushrooms; saute till soft. Once they're soft, train out the excess liquid:
Once the potatoes are done boiling, drained and a little cooled down, you can start adding in the mushrooms, onions, bacon and ranch dressing. Now, I added in ranch dressing, salt and black pepper as I went along to "hone" in the flavor I was going for. All in all, this came out amazing :) I hope everyone at the party likes it!
PS: I didn't list the recipe because I'm sneaky like that!
Today's energy is going to be invested in making the bacon potatoes since yesterday I the majority of the day to clean potatoes and mushrooms. When I pick up potatoes from the Commissary, they're normally already scrubbed down and washed..so all I have to do is a quick wash once I get them home. Well. I guess since potatoes are in such high demand right now, they ran out of their usual potato sacks and got some from the local economy. Doesn't sound all that bad till you realize all the potatoes are straight out of the ground. Not scrubbed. Still have clumps of dirt spackled to them. Fun stuff.
The mammoth size stockpot I gotta use to make all of the potatoes. Scary thing is, I have TWO of these! You're looking at a 42 quart stock pot. We originally bought these from Wal-Mart back in California, but you can find them on GSI Outdoors ....Side note: We didn't pay nearly what they're asking for (we got these about 2 years ago).
The stock pot with about 15lbs of potatoes:
All of the lovely mushrooms (roughly 3lbs):
I tend to peel the skins off of 'em, despite washing them and what not. It's easier than to scrub scrub scrub and feel like you didn't get all the poopy soil off of it. Sorry, but mushrooms are grown in super poop saturated soil. Just sayin'!
One with and one without the skin:
Chopped up:
Eric dealt with the onions, LOL. I would've taken pictures of them but they were burning my eyes far to much to try to focus the camera on it. They were potent lil things!
Since the main ingredient in the recipe is bacon, I ended up buying four packs of extra thick cut bacon. I didn't wanna stand in front of the stove top all morning frying them, so we resorted to using my stoneware bar pan (works VERY well and helps to season it even further!) and stuck them in the oven ( 375* for 22 minutes). I'm sure you're probably thinking that the pan looks gross, but it's supposed to be brown like that (aside from the grease). The darker the pan, the more seasoned it is. I've seen some to where they're almost black!
Once the bacon was done, I chopped the strips up into smaller pieces:
When the first two batches of bacon was done, we poured the excess grease into our stir fry pan since we were wanting to use some to fry up the onion and mushrooms:
Toss in the onions and let 'em cook till they're soft, then add in the mushrooms; saute till soft. Once they're soft, train out the excess liquid:
Once the potatoes are done boiling, drained and a little cooled down, you can start adding in the mushrooms, onions, bacon and ranch dressing. Now, I added in ranch dressing, salt and black pepper as I went along to "hone" in the flavor I was going for. All in all, this came out amazing :) I hope everyone at the party likes it!
PS: I didn't list the recipe because I'm sneaky like that!
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