Sometimes, the stomach wants, what the stomach wants

The Food Scavenger's roommate has coined the wonderfully apt term of "the stomach wants, what the stomach wants" to describe the daily conundrums of the Food Scavenger: what to eat and when to eat it. Originally, the Food Scavenger thought she would bestow upon the Mount Holyoke populace a recipe that has been handed from her grandmother to her mother and finally to her: Triple S Peanuts, a staple, really, with all the personal connotations of comfort and wonder and love. However, something else reared its edible and delicious head: the versatile potato skin.

Ah, the Food Scavenger laughs at those potato-chips eaters: why eat potato chips, when you could have warm, crunchy potato skins right out of the oven? The potato skin, while ugly and in appearance unappetizing is transformed by the oven into a sizzling crisp awaiting salsa and guacamole or wishing to be filled with tomatoes and mozzarella cheese (for a pizza version) or broccoli and swiss cheese or avocado hearts and olives and salami (for those lovers of the salty and sour).

The possibilities are endless, the results guaranteed to be delicious. Indeed, as the Food Scavenger crunches along through her potato skin chip liberally decked in salsa and guacamole, accompanied by the sweetness of baked zucchini she is near tears with joy over the repeated gustatory success of potato skins. Fools, her stomach cries, fools for throwing away the best part of a potato!

There, they lay before you: the ugly ducklings of the pre-baked world.

Yet, in twenty minutes under 385 degrees Fahrenheit, they become golden and beautiful. The image below only hints visually as to the transformation. For the baker living the moment, upon opening the oven, all her senses are engaged: the sizzling of the potato skin, the sweet, refreshing scent of the zucchini, the underlying hearty creaminess of the potato wafting through the air.

And there you have it: all the ingredients necessary for a meal of potato skin chips and accompaniments.

So, the potato skin chips can be eaten in two ways:

Sliced in pieces like so to be eaten chip-like, dipped in salsa and guacamole:

Baked like this, they brown much more quickly to become the wonderful crisp below (the Food Scavenger had this one just as is):

Or left in its natural cupped-shape, to then be filled with salsa and guacamole:

It holds its shape remarkable well, making it perfect finger food. One bite later, still intact:

Potato Skin Chips with Guacamole and Salsa: 1 potato skin, 1/2 cup of salsa, 1/4 guacamole (for my fellow college mates: this means two to-go containers of salsa and one to-go container of guacamole from Blanchard)

Preheat oven to 385 degrees Fahrenheit. Bake 20 minutes (or more if you want it even more crisp)

Baked Zucchini: : 1/2 cup of sliced length-wise zucchini

While oven is being preheated, place zucchini in. Remove after 25 minutes.


This is the face of love: a meal smiling back at you.

Now let the Food Scavenger tell you the story of how these potato skins came into being: Her roommate loved to eat potatoes. She shelled them out with zeal and then tossed the skins away. And each time this happened, a pang went through the Food Scavenger's heart at the sheer waste, for from a young age, the Food Scavenger had always questioned this instinct in people for tossing away the foreign and ugly bits of food.

Let us flash backwards to a time when the Food Scavenger was a wee little girl sitting by her grandfather, while he cut an apple.

Grandfather would quarter the apple, slice the core and place it to the side. This was acceptable to the wee little Food Scavenger. She had once tried to gnaw on the core to no avail, resulting in only an aching jaw and throbbing gums from the multiple stabs of the resistant (and vaguely belligerent) core. Then, he began to skin the apple. This awakened alarm from the wee Food Scavenger.

"Grandfather," the wee Food Scavenger began. "Why do you not eat the skin?"

Grandfather paused. Like any adult confronted with a question, which in truth would have the answer of "I don't like it" thus negating all the dictatorial response of "It's good for you" to the little one's declaration "I don't want to," he finally settled on, "It's not good for you." But, oh, his morals got the best of him and he hastened to add, "No, it's good for you. I just don't like to eat it."

Appeased, the wee Food Scavenger comforted him with these choice words of "I'll eat it for you." And so, wee Food Scavenger and Grandfather sat side by side, Grandfather with his pile of skinless quarters or eights and wee Food Scavenger with her pile of skins.

After munching on one of his eighths, Grandfather turned to the Food Scavenger, eyes questioning.

The Food Scavenger replied, "I like how chewy and tart the skins are. They balance the crisp and sweet insides."

Grandfather nodded and then bent to his pile. The Food Scavenger had never turned away from her pile and even in the midst of answering had been chewing away at her apple skins (later, she would be told that this was bad manners, but at the time the thought of stopping eating to talk just never occurred to her).

So concludes the flashback, but not the cycle of the Food Scavenger rescuing the discards of other people's food.

One fateful day, the Food Scavenger turned to her roommate and said, "Hey, leave the skins here for me, I think I have an idea for them."

And thus, the potato skin baking and eating frenzy began.