This weekend’s cooking plans from my collection of recipes included making stuffed potato skins (along with more bran muffins for my mom, and some chocolate buttercrunch.)
My recipe for stuffed potato skins is a bit of a no-brainer, whose formal existence as a recipe lies more in the documenting the amounts of ingredients required so as to minimize waste and leftovers, or scrambling about to prepare extra ingredients to use up other already-prepared ingredients. Originally, making the stuffed potato skins was both an effort to add to my collection of recipes that could be used to fill the freezer, as well as a response to a desire to make stuffed potato skins, critically, using items I normally have on hand (potatoes, cheese, and in this case, frozen cooked breakfast sausages); however, yummy as they are, there was no pretense to attempt to replicate some mythically great potato skins eaten at some hypothetical pub.
First, five potatoes were taken out …
… and then washed — in this picture, save one, to show the comparison between cleaned and not (although the bag of potatoes does say “washed potatoes”).
Potatoes were halved along their length:
The potatoes were then somewhat hollowed out (before cooking, instead of after, as mentioned in my recipe, so that I could boil the removed pulp later to make mashed potatoes), while leaving a generous amount of the potato pulp in the skins:
The pulps from the potatoes were placed in water, to boil later …
… and with which to ultimately make a bit of mashed potatoes to be used in a lunch in the next couple of days:
Back to the potato skins: The hollowed out potatoes were placed on a microwave-safe plate:
The plate of hollowed out potatoes were placed in the microwave oven (1200 watts) for 10 minutes:
Once cooked (a few skins needed another couple of minutes to finish cooking), the hollowed out potatoes were placed on a flat surface (a cutting board), ready for stuffing with sausage cubes:
Earlier, three frozen, pre-cooked breakfast sausages were placed on a cutting board:
The sausages were sliced lengthwise …
… and sliced again lengthwise, making spears:
The spears were sliced cross-wise in order to make little cubes …
… which were then transferred to a bowl …
… and which was put aside to be used at the point at which the cooked potato skins were to be stuffed:
A block of cheese (cheddar in this case) was taken out, along with a cheese slicer:
About 100g of slices of cheese were cut off of the block …
… and placed on top of the potato skins filled with sausage cubes:
The potato skins were placed in a countertop convection oven preheated to 350F for 15 minutes:
The first batch of cooked potato skins were taken out of the oven, smelling yummy!
Once all the stuffed potato skins were cooked and cooled, a couple of them were put aside for supper, while the other eight stuffed potato skins were placed in a container for freezing:
Yes, they were yummy!