Oven-Fried Potato Wedges

The Food Scavenger's roommate has finally tired of eating potatoes and so she decided to end her potato eating days by making oven-fried potato wedges. She'd searched long and hard through the Internet looking at recipes, which involved oil and spices and custom-made condiments, but when push came to shove (or her own weekend laziness and show-watching came to fore), she acted simply, blindly baking and cutting.

Thus, the oven-fried potato wedge was born. By her second baking attempt, she'd happened on the perfect baking time and temperature.

First, collect the necessary materials (knife for cutting, potatoes, and aluminum foil):

Then, while pre-heating the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit slice up the potato into wedges:

Done, arrange them onto aluminum foil paper and place them into the oven, like so and wait 45 minutes for the beautiful browning and crunch below:

Enjoy as is or with your favorite accompaniments (in this scavenger's case: enjoy with dijon mustard):

Lovely, no?

Potato Skin Wedges Recipe: Cut two potatoes into wedges of 6 to 8 depending on the size of the potato. Then, bake for 45 minutes at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Serve immediately.

Potato Skins with Broccolli, Tomatoes, Swiss Cheese, and Basil and Oregano

Bake 350 degrees Fahrenheit for an hour (at 50 minutes, add slices of Swiss cheese and shake basil and oregano both beneath and on top of the cheese):

It's a potato skin meal Christmas tree!

The addicting potato skin...

Once you begin, it's so hard to stop...

Entire weekends have passed just like this with the Food Scavenger wallowing happily in the greatness that is the potato skin. In this case, the Food Scavenger decided to experiment a little and test the potato skin waters for cheese: gouda and swiss (two cheeses that she rescued from the infamy of the compost bucket). She made a few notes when making potato skins again: depending on the size and thickness of the potato skin, timing needs to be changed accordingly. Without pre-heating the oven, three small potato skins would be done within 20 minutes. Again, without pre-heating the oven two large potato skins with much flesh still adhering to them took 40 minutes:

Before Baking

After 15 minutes of baking

After 30 minutes of baking

After 40 minutes of baking

On the left is swiss cheese and on the right is gouda cheese

Baked 5 minutes for bubbly cheese

And voila! A meal for the gods... or one Food Scavenger

Salsa Zucchini, Corn, and Tomato Soup: 3.5 cups diced zucchini, 1 cup corn, 1 cup halved grape tomatoes, 1.5 cups salsa (6 to-go containers of salsa from Blanchard), optional - liberal dashes of tabasco sauce

Bring a pot of water to a boil (about 3-4 cups of water and, as always, less or more depending on your preference). Add zucchini. Simmer until zucchini loses opacity and flirts with translucense. Add corn and halved grape tomatoes. Add salsa. Continue to simmer until tomatoes are well done (i.e. mushy). Salt or spice further depending on your taste buds.

The Food Scavenger's verdict on the cheese: gouda wins this round. Swiss suits sandwiches more.

Also, continuing the Food Scavenger's love affair with containers:

Blanchard's to-go salad containers = potato skins reservoir

Gigantic peanut butter jar = perfect, spill-safe soup container

It's alive! (Or a short-cut on how to make a successful Baba Au Rhum cake)

Long ago, the Food Scavenger's mother requested that she make for her a Baba Au Rhum Cake. The Food Scavenger shrugged, nodded, and then consulted the internet. She found Ina Garten's Baba Au Rhum recipe and at the behest of her mother, withheld the raisins and simply made the cake as is. The problem was the dough failed to rise, until the fateful baking time, during which it rose lopsided and misshapen.
Looking at the cake with its tumor-like protusion, the Food Scavenger's mother turned to her and said, "It's just the first time."

But it wasn't.

It happened a second time.

And then a third time.

But the fourth time, months later after the Food Scavenger went through a phase of baking bread: it rose when it was supposed to. For the Food Scavenger, using her baking bread expertise founded a short-cut through a combination of Google and Youtube (Thank you Chef John and your foodwishes channel, the Food Scavenger hopes one day to also go on a sourdough starter adventure). The following short-cut was devised from three simple conclusions the Food Scavenger had made about yeast: it liked moisture, it liked heat, it liked closed places. And voila! A method was born.

Follow Ina Garten's recipe per usual, until you come to setting the dough to the side to rise.

First, boil a pot of water. Then, pour the boiling water into a pan. Place the pan in the oven a level below your mold (buttered, with the dough already poured in). Cover the top of your mold with saran wrap. Close the oven door. Wait 45 minutes. Marvel at how your dough has quadrupled in size, rising above your mold. Remove the pan with now lukewarm/hot water. Place the mold into the water. Preheat the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit for baking. Meanwhile, the dough will actually rise a little more with the added heat of the water passing through the mold. When the oven is ready, remove the saran wrap, gently scraping the dough off with a spatula.

From here on out, resume following Ina Garten's recipe.

And then you will have a beautiful Baba Au Rhum Cake:



My brother, who was eating an orange nearby, decided to dress up the cake with a flower he'd carved from his orange peals.

He's pretty handy, eh? In the end, the cake was dressed up with canned peaches since we'd use their juices, a pear concentrate in the syrup.

The occasion for this Baba Au Rhum Cake was the Food Scavenger's Grandmother's birthday. You can see her hand in the background.

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.