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Community Table from Epicurious

from Epicurious

Take your place at the table

A few years back we were on vacation and happened upon a restaurant called Grannies's.

With a name like that, we had to try it.

C'mon, Grannie's?

Country cooking, visions of a grandmother standing over a stove, stirring something that smelled like heaven and tasted as good as it smelled.

So we went in and looked at the menu. We like reading menu's before we eat at a restaurant. Sometimes the menu just gets downright silly with the descriptions, and you wonder why someone will shell out good money for spinach that was harvested using only gently sustainable efforts on the latter side of a new moon..

You've read that kind of menu, I know you have. And maybe you've eaten there as well, but I love seeing the descriptions of the food offered at any new restaurant I want to try.

This menu was pretty basic, but they had one item on there that stood out for me. And that was the Potcakes. The only other Potcakes I'd ever heard of were the dogs that you find in the Bahamas.

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So I ordered them as my side to the meatloaf, and they were so good. Deep fried potato cakes, crispy and melty and yummy, with little bits of sweet onions mixed in.

I've been trying to replicate them ever since, with no success. I've actually eaten the evidence of my failures. Although some have been consigned as offerings to the Kitchen Goddess. sigh

I finally done did it. Made them, just the way I remember those Potcakes from so long ago. And all it took was me messing up some mashed potatoes and deciding to take that failure and make a potato cake for lunch. I'd made the mashed taters with new Yukon Gold potatoes and they didn't have the starch in them like russets, and quite frankly they were a little gluey. I ate a little bit of them, then consigned the remainder to the fridge.

I didn't measure out exactly, but I had about 1 1/2 cups of mashed potatoes (made with fresh gold potatoes, not russet. I just added an egg, about 1/2 cup of Wondra flour, mixed that all up with half a chopped onion and then fried them in a little hot oil.

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I then glopped (technical term here) some Creme Fraiche on top of them and proceeded to eat three of them. I left one for later.

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OK, so I ate the first one I took a picture of, then proceeded to eat two more.

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But they were worth it.

So, the next time you make gluey mashed taters, rather than tossing them, try adding a little Wondra Flour, a chopped onion and an egg to them, and frying them up as Potcakes.


Read the original on: Sid's Sea Palm Cooking

Sid's Sea Palm Cooking, Sid Munkholm McOmie

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I love to cook, feed people and have fun in the kitchen.