Potato cakes

My brother mentioned on Thanksgiving that I have a food blog, and oh maybe I'd like to do something with it sometime soon? He wouldn't take my lack of camera batteries as an excuse, so this is for him. Fried food for you, little brother!

For some reason, I thought that 3 pounds of potatoes for 5 people on Thanksgiving sounded like a reasonable amount. And it might have been, if I only served mashed potatoes. But I went and loaded the menu up with 64 different carbs, rendering the mashed potatoes an overkill. A delicious overkill, but overkill nonetheless.

And because my mashed potatoes are not unhealthy enough - hello butter and half-and-half, loves of my life - I decided to fry the leftovers. Hello clogged arteries!

These were really good, though. Possibly even worth the inevitable heart attack. I got 10 little cakes out of this recipe

2 cups cold mashed potatoes
1 egg, beaten
1/2 cup shredded cheese
2 Tbsp flour, + dredging
butter/oil for frying
salt

Heat your butter and/or oil in a skillet over medium high heat.

Put the potatoes, egg, cheese and 2 Tbsp flour in a bowl and mix until combined.

Form into small cakes - about the size of a sausage patty.

Dredge the cakes lightly in flour and put them into the hot oil. Cook until browned, then flip - about 4-5 minutes per side.

Drain on a towel, and sprinkle with salt while hot.

And just for my little brother, here's a Crappy Cell Phone snap of the little wonders:



Notes: The potatoes need to be cold or the cakes won't hold together very well.
Use butter or oil or mix it up. I used half butter and half canola oil.
If you make these too big, they'll fall apart when you flip them.
I think adding a little hot sauce would be awesome, but then The Professor would accuse me of trying to kill him. So I skipped the hot sauce.

Peach Butter Banana Bread

A few weeks ago, I scored a bunch of cheap peaches - and by "bunch", I mean 8 pounds, which is roughly 4 times the amount of peaches ever seen in my kitchen before. When The Professor saw me come in from the farmer's market, he groaned. All he could see in his future was a mound of dirty pots, pans and utensils that would spill out of the sink and onto every available work surface. He also saw in his future a prolonged period of time in which he would not be welcome in the kitchen - he has a miraculous ability to always be in the spot to which I am moving - and this made him sad, with all of the food being in the kitchen and him banished.

And then I turned Operation: Peach Butter into a two day project, which only gave me the opportunity to dirty the dishes all over again. Luckily, I remembered to pull out food for dinner.

So at the end of the weekend I had over 7 pints of Spiced Peach Butter (where "spiced" = ginger, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon), divied up into 28 little containers. Because I had done 7 rounds with my boiling water canner and couldn't face another one, I left the last 1/2 pint unprocessed and put it in the fridge.

A couple of weeks ago, I ran across a recipe for banana bread that used apple butter as an ingredient, and from then on, that peach butter was destined to go into some banana bread.




Ingredients:

• 3 cups self rising flour
• 1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
• 4 slightly beaten eggs
• 1 1/2 cup sugar
• 4 medium bananas, mashed
• 1 cup spiced peach butter
• 1/2 cup canola oil

Heat oven to 350.

In a large bowl, mix together the flour and pumpkin pie spice.

In a separate bowl, mix the eggs, sugar, bananas, peach butter and oil together. Add to the flour mixture and stir until combined (it's gonna be lumpy).

Divide into two greased 8 inch loaf pans and cook for 45 minutes. Cool in pans for 10 minutes, and then on racks until completely cool.

Notes:
Would it be too meta to spread slices of this with more peach butter?
If I ever make this again, I think I'd add another banana. It didn't have quite enough banana flavor for me.