Potato Skins: The Verdict

As with any meal or dish that exists only in the mind before it is attempted to be brought into the tangible world things don't go quite as expected.  As per the previous post the plan was to create potato skins without a recipe with the twist of using sweet potatoes instead of the standard Idaho spud.  The sweet potatoes took quite a while to get cooked, and when I thought they were done, they were still in need of more cooking for the core of the potato.  If you're trying this at home you might as well put the sweet potatoes in the oven for a full day or just ask Orpheus to run them down to Hades for the afternoon.  If you seriously want to know how long this should cook and what temperature then hopefully you'll be less lazy than me and look it up.  The next issue that occurred was that unlike bar skins these sweet skins just fell right off from the rest of the potato.  This is when I went to plan B.  Plan B consisted of making some hasty mashed potatoes.  I didn't have a masher or even anything worthy of mashing so I used a plastic spatula and a lot of elbow grease.  Since we had no milk that was fresh I used some cream to give it a consistency that was a little easier to work with.  For some reason at this point I decided to throw some curry in.  It just seemed to make sense and ended up working out really well.  It compliments the flavor of the sweet potato really well, and Elizabeth didn't realize that it was even in there even though I put in a little more than I intended.

While all this was happening I was grilling up some bacon on the George Foreman grill, which really does a good job of draining the grease efficiently.  It makes for easier cleanup as well.  I like to throw a little chili powder on the bacon just to season it up a little bit. 

Back to the potato.  I cut the skin of the two potatoes into strips about and inch wide.  I placed the strips on a baking sheet and then turned the oven to 360.  It doesn't need to be too hot, you just want to melt everything together.  I then scooped my the potato mash into skins, threw on a some chives, broken up bits of the cooked bacon, and then covered it in SHARP cheddar.  I capitalize SHARP because if you are going to eat cheddar it might be a good idea to actually taste it.  Since the sweet potato skins are really thin I then folded then into a cup around the filling.

At this point you throw it in the oven for a few minutes until the cheese is nice and melty, then you take it out and you have some decent tasting potato skins.

The Verdict - Pretty good, could use some tweaks, but worth pursuing.