One thing that you should know about me first before reading this post is that I am the type of cook that depends on a recipe book. If there is no cookbook or recipe to follow, I cannot do it. I don’t know if it’s because I tend to be obsessive-compulsive about following a set of directions or if it was because I was brought up taking cooking lessons that followed cookbooks, but I just cannot do these things on the fly. I need a set of directions to follow or I will surely fail.
I’ve always wanted to cook and the only time I’ve ever had the chance to was over the holidays. With the family together and willing to be my taste testers, I finally had the chance to try out some of the easy recipes that I’ve saved from Pinterest.
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| Crispy Cheese & Bacon Potatoes - Clare Henney Version |
Cheese is a big thing for me. I love cheese. Naturally, several of the recipes I tried over the holidays involved a lot of cheese. One of them is this recipe for Crispy Cheese & Bacon Potatoes, which I based on the post of Mary from Barefeet in the Kitchen. I say based because I had to make some changes to it.
Here is my version:
Ingredients:
1/2 pound bacon
6 cups of potatoes, peeled and chopped into 1/2" pieces
1 tsp salt
3/4 tsp ground pepper
1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
Instructions:
Bake the bacon strips in a turbo broiler at 250 to 300 degrees at 10 minutes or until crispy. Drain the bacon on a paper towel and keep some of the grease for the potatoes later. Chop the bacon into small pieces and set aside.
Peel and chop the potatoes and bake the potatoes in the broiler along with the leftover bacon grease. Make sure to coat it with grease and sprinkle it with salt and pepper. Bake it for 20 minutes, stir then bake again for an additional 20 minutes. Stir again and bake for another 15 minutes (that's a lot of baking I know, but it's worth it!).
Add the chopped bacon to the potatoes and sprinkle with shredded cheese and bake for another 2-3 minutes or until all the cheese has melted then it's ready to serve.
If you checked the original recipe, I made some changes to my version. For one thing, we don't have those large potatoes where I live so I had to make do with the potatoes we have available. I also didn't have any Kosher salt so I used iodized salt. Another change is that we don't have a pepper grinder so I had to buy store-bought ground pepper. I couldn't mix up any other kind of cheese so I used regular cheddar cheese we got from the mini-mart.
Another major change: we don't have an oven here at home so I used our turbo broiler. That was a bit of a challenge when it came to baking the bacon. Following the time recommended and temperature for the recipe meant burnt bacon on my first try so I had to adjust things a bit. It was no longer burnt but it wasn't as crispy as I wanted. Personally, I feel I would have made it crispier if I had fried it but I was done baking them by the time I thought of it. Mary's recipe also added some sliced green onions as garnish. We didn't have any either so I skipped it.
The verdict from the family was that it was good and that it was something they could imagine having when they are dining out, which I consider a compliment!
Looking back, I don’t think that this was an easy recipe, considering how many times I had to bake and stir the potatoes and how much time I had to bake the bacon (because you could only bake so many bacon strips on a round turbo broiler). It seemed easy enough when I was reading it but it was a challenge to do it because it took too much time.
At the end of the day, all the hard work paid off because the kids loved it. I have a feeling that they were pretty impressed that I managed to pull it off considering that I never spend time in the kitchen (unless it was to get something to eat).
Thank you, Mary, for your recipe! I would not have been able to pull it off without it!
* This is an old entry from my old blog, edited/updated for this one. Hope you liked it!
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