PARTY POTATO SKINS

First, the actual recipe. And I'm going to give this to you exactly the way it appeared in Southern Living's Five Star Recipe Collection in 1990. Then I'm going to tell you how I "corrected" it.

This collection was published by Oxmoor House. It was one of those "buy five recipe cards a month FOREVER and you'll have yourself a jim-dandy cookbook that only cost you about $200 by the time you have the whole collection" things. It took me a year and a half, but I did it. I got all the recipe cards. I guess since I'm still using it 17 years later and really, all the recipes are very good, it was worth it. Right? Of course it was.

PARTY POTATO SKINS

8 small baking potatoes
Vegetable oil
Garlic salt
2 cups (8 ounces) shredded Cheddar cheese
12 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives, divided
2 tablespoons chopped green chiles
1 (8-ounce) carton sour cream
1/8 teaspoon ground red pepper

Scrub potatoes, and rub skins with oil. Prick each potato several times with a fork. Bake at 400* for 30 to 45 minutes or until potatoes are done.

Allow potatoes to cool to touch. Cut top third off each potato; discard tops. Carefully scoop out pulp, leaving about 1/8-inch-thick shells. (Reserve potato pulp for other uses.)

Fry potato skins in hot oil (375*) for 3 to 4 minutes or until browned. Invert and drain on paper towels. Place potato skins, cut side up, on an ungreased baking sheet. Sprinkle with garlic salt and Cheddar cheese. Broil 6 inches from heat for 30 seconds or until cheese melts. Top potato skins with bacon and 1 tablespoon chives.

Press green chiles between paper towels to remove excess moisture. Combine chiles, sour cream, and red pepper in a small bowl; stir well. Top with remaining 1 tablespoon chives. Serve with potato skins. Yield: 8 servings.

First correction: instead of cutting off the top third of the potato, cut them in half. That yields 16 potato skins. I thought that one was pretty obvious.


These are my favorite pj's. They're Nautica Sleepwear and I have three pair because they're just the most comfortable.....WAIT! I'm doing a recipe here! DO scrub the potatoes because after all, they're "skins" and there's really no way around eating the skins.

And DO prick them with a fork all around because if you're just bored to death, I promise you cleaning out your oven after a potato exploded in it is just a great way to spend an afternoon. Don't wrap the potatoes in foil. You want the skins to be "tough," not soft.



Here's your ingredients. And can I just say this about the recipe? The amounts given in the list of ingredients are entirely subjective. It's not like the cake's not going to rise if you blow it on the baking powder measurement. As Truvie would say, "It's a matter of taste." We love cheese and bacon and green onions. Chives are expensive. So I double the cheese and bacon, use scallions instead of chives and so forth and make them the way we like them.


COOKING TIP

When I'm making a recipe that calls for cooked and crumbled bacon, I do this. I put the bacon on my cutting board and slice it across the grain into tiny slivers. THEN I put it into my frying pan and cook it. Honestly, it comes out perfect every time. You can cook a whole pound of bacon this way where, if you were frying it by slices, you'd only be able to fit 8 or ten slices into your frying pan at a time. Crumbling cooked bacon by hand is greasy and messy. This is much easier.


Just slice it across the grain, very thinly,



put it into the frying pan and stir it a lot as it cooks,


and you have perfectly cooked and CRUMBLED bacon. Cool, huh?


Trust me. No matter how well you think you drained the green chiles, you didn't drain them well enough. Spread them on a layer of paper towels and then press another layer of towels over them. Look at all the moisture I got out of my green chiles after I'd drained them. Moisture equals runny dipping sauce.




As soon as you can handle the potatoes without getting burned, cut them in half and scoop them out. I like to leave a pretty thick layer of potato in the skin. My husband wants to bite into something of substance.




Don't throw this away. The pulp you scraped from the baked potatoes is a wonderful thing to save and add to soups and stews later. (You can put it into a ziplock and freeze it.) Actually, I'll be making her potato soup next week and I'll use the pulp for this recipe. Really, I just don't believe in wasting food and the stuff you scrape out of your baked potatoes to make this appetizer doesn't have to be wasted.


I never ever fry anything. Really, I just don't because we all know frying things is pretty much not healthy. But....there's no getting around it, the one thing that makes these potato skins special is that you fry the skins before you stuff them. I remember when I tried to recreate the potato skins I'd had at a restaurant and guessed at how to do it. They were disappointing because they were too soft. Potato skins should be a little crunchy.



And so...I sprinkled these potato skins with garlic powder and then I really loaded them with Cheddar cheese because I want them to be substantial. Then I put them under the broiler for a few minutes.....don't take your eye off them - the cheese melts very quickly and can burn if you're not careful. Then I took them out and smothered them in bacon and scallions. (I press the bacon down into the cheese so it "sticks" and doesn't fall off into the dipping sauce...and then...I let Rob know they were ready. I think he'll make a big dent in these before I even finish this post. He loves them.



I hope the recipe doesn't scare you. It's not as labor intensive as it probably sounds. These really are delicious and a favorite around here so to me, the work they involve is worth it.