Thoughts in a nutshell...

Making Old Fashioned Potato Candies and Reminiscing

So here is St. Patrick’s Day around the corner (literally tomorrow) and it is snowing like crazy. Snow days always turn into cooking days for me, and cooking days usually turn into blog-about-your-cooking days. So here I am again showing off my cooking, photographic, and networking skills. As tomorrow is St. Patrick’s Day and I am very Irish (hence the name: Kelly) I always do something special. St. Patrick’s Day at my house usually was a hearty meal with, of course, potatoes. We’re talkin’ scalloped potatoes, mashed potatoes, baked potatoes, seasoned potatoes, and many other varieties. But one tradition I will never forget is the tradition of making potato candies. My grandmother started this tradition and so this is a food I hold dear to my heart. She didn’t only make these for St. Patrick’s Day but also for Christmas. That was always a great thing to look forward to when getting her Christmas package in the mail, I always knew there would be potato candies in there.

This year I had an extra reason to make the potato candies (which I have never made on my own) because I am taking the Politics and Poetics of the Potato class. This gives me a reason to make them for someone other than myself (because face it I can’t make a batch and eat them all by myself.)

In case anyone wondered what potato candies are… this is what I’m making:

Humorous side-note: The ones above are not the ones I’m making… the ones I’m making will not look nearly as neat and perfect.

So first we start with ingredients:

A small potato, 2 lbs of powdered sugar, and peanut butter.

The potato I chose is a certified organic potato from Green Thumb Farms in Fryeburg, Maine. Isn’t it cute?

The first step is to peel and cut up your potato, and then boil it until it is thoroughly cooked and soft.

Then you mash it:

After there is no possibility of a potato lump then you add one pound of the sugar and it does this weird thing where it basically turns to liquid, I definitely wasn’t expecting that:

After you add the second half however if calms down and turns into a usable substance. I wonder why it turned to liquid in the first place however, maybe some kind of chemical reaction between the sugar and the potato?

Next you need to prepare an area to spread out your mixture, I didn’t know I was out of parchment paper until now so I just used aluminum foil and sprinkled some powdered sugar so it wouldn’t stick.

After I put the dough out I got out my rolling pin. I think it’s really suiting that my grandmother gave me this rolling pin, I bet she used it on her potato candies also…

I tried my best to get it into a nice rectangle shape but the “dough” is not very pliable at all.

I then spread a layer of peanut butter on it, I didn’t add as much as my grandmother did because I don’t really like peanut butter as much but it really makes the candy…

Roll it just like when making a pumpkin roll:

This is what my rolled product looked like (guess it’s good I didn’t add too much peanut butter because even that little bit was squeezing out)

I cut it in half for easier portability to the fridge and let it set up for about an hour.

I then cut it into one inch pieces (you can see by the trial and error pieces that cutting it any thinner doesn’t work)

My final work: Now isn’t that just as cute as a potato? Well I thought the potato was cute anyway…

Here is how my final work came out:

I think they look similar to the picture I found online but at least it is similar.

Mine came out pretty crumbly, I wonder if my potato should have been larger? Either way it tastes fabulous and just like I remember it tasting :) these don’t have to be refrigerated but I’m going to anyway so that they stay cool and hold their shape well. I think my grandmother would be proud and I hope my classmates (and possibly the speaker we have visiting) will enjoy!

Three Men Waiting To Get Into Heaven

“Three men were standing in line to get into heaven one day. Apparently it had been a pretty busy day, though, so Peter had to tell the first one, “Heaven’s getting pretty close to full today, and I’ve been asked to admit only people who have had particularly horrible deaths.So what’s your story?”
 
So the first man replies: “Well, for a while I’ve suspected my wife has been cheating on me, so today I came home early to try to catch her red-handed.As I came into my 25th floor apartment, I could tell something was wrong, but all my searching around didn’t reveal where this other guy could have been hiding.Finally, I went out to the balcony, and sure enough, there was this man hanging off the railing, 25 floors above ground!By now I was really mad, so I started beating on him and kicking him, but wouldn’t you know it, he wouldn’t fall off.  So finally I went back into my apartment and got a hammer and starting hammering on his fingers.Of course, he couldn’t stand that for long, so he let go and fell — but even after 25 stories, he fell into the bushes, stunned but okay.I couldn’t stand it anymore, so I ran into the kitchen, grabbed the fridge and threw it over the edge where it landed on him, killing him instantly.But all the stress and anger got to me, and I had a heart attack and died there on the balcony.”
 
“That sounds like a pretty bad day to me,” said Peter, and let the man in.
 
The second man comes up and Peter explains to him about heaven being full, and again asks for his story.
 
“It’s been a very strange day.You see, I live on the 26th floor of my apartment building, and every morning I do my exercises out on my balcony.Well, this morning I must have slipped or something, because I fell over the edge.But I got lucky, and caught the railing of the balcony on the floor below me.I knew I couldn’t hang on for very long, when suddenly this man burst out onto the balcony.I thought for sure I was saved, when he started beating on me and kicking me. I held on the best I could until he ran into the apartment and grabbed a hammer and started pounding on my hands. Finally I just let go, but again I got lucky and fell into the bushes below, stunned but all right. Just when I was thinking I was going to be okay, this refrigerator comes falling out of the sky and crushes me instantly, and now I’m here.”
 
Once again, Peter had to concede that that sounded like a pretty horrible death.
 
The third man came to the front of the line, and again the whole process was repeated.Peter explained that heaven was full and asked for his story.
 
“Picture this,” says the third man, “I’m hiding naked inside a refrigerator…”

Courtesy of: http://www.cheergiver.com/adult-jokes/three-men-waiting-to-get-into-heaven.html