PO TAY TOES

Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew!

Or, of course, dehydrate them.  Which I totally did last week.

First we had to buy a food processor, which I'll tell you about in a moment.  While I waited for it to come in the mail, I dehydrated some lean ground turkey and some carrots, peas, corn, and green beans.  I did those  according to the instructions at www.backpackingchef.com, and they came out just fine.  I bought some nice yellow potatoes at the farmers' market in Grand Army Plaza, on one of those nice sunny days where it actually ends up snowing halfway through your pleasant walk around the park, and maybe the jeans you were wearing were a little too thin and you end up almost freezing your legs off, and then the next day it's sunny and 50 degrees somehow.  And I talked endlessly about my potato plans.

My potato "bark," as Chef Glen calls it on his website and in his wonderful e-book, was going to come out awesome, I was quite sure.  Way more awesome than the potato cubes I tried to dehydrate a while back.  I didn't cut them small enough, not even close, and after probably twelve hours in the dehydrator, a ton of them were still soft in the middle.  And they didn't look very appetizing.  I put them in a jar anyway, just to see what happened.  Now they look like this:

Not so nice.  I won't be trying to dry potato chunks again, not unless I'm slicing them to chip-thickness, which is to say very thin, which is to say, I need a mandoline, which is another kitchen gadget I don't want to purchase right before moving out of here.  Plus, I don't want a crappy one.  I want a nice one that isn't going to dull after I slice up a few cucumbers and peppers and potatoes.  To chip-thickness.  So.  I'll be saving my pennies.  Anyway, why dry sliced potatoes when you can make potato bark?!  For convenient use in many backpacking meals!

"You know, we can buy potato flakes," said my life-long hiking partner.  "We can buy the ones that are a hundred percent potato.  Like, nothing but potato."

No!  Just, no way!  Why would I buy potato flakes for assembling backpacking meals, when I could spend all my time and energy making my own potato flakes?  I mean really, you could buy buckets and buckets of any type of dehydrated food you wanted, and you could be pretty sure that it wouldn't have any white fuzzy bits, and maybe it wouldn't even be that expensive.  But where's the fun in that?  Where's the productivity?

But yes, I did feel like I was spending all my time and energy on these potatoes, maybe because I decided to make them right after a particularly exhausting ten-hour shift, maybe because of all the mistakes I made along the way.  The first one, of course, being that I didn't measure anything.

Well, I measured the cup of beef broth that I used in the mash--you can't use butter and milk because it won't dehydrate well--and I measured out the Worcestershire sauce I was using to give it a little bit of a shepherd's pie flavoring when it all came together in the end.  But I didn't weigh out the 2.5 pounds of potatoes that Chef Glen calls for in his recipe, in fact I probably used quite a bit more.  Nor did I realize that one cup of beef broth is 8 ounces, not the 16 called for in the recipe.  I was tired, okay?  I just wanted to get this potato goop into the dehydrator.

Before you spread it on the trays, though, you have to blend it up so it gets extra goopy.  You will notice on the Backpacking Chef website a picture of a nice pourable liquid potato.  It looks so convenient, so easy to spread.  So I popped my beefy mash into the fridge to cool off a little before scooping it into the food processor.  Another mistake.  I think this processor is not the correct device to use for this recipe.  In fact, there is a warning in the instruction booklet: Do not puree or mash starchy vegetables like potatoes. They will be overprocessed in a second and turn gummy.  Yes, I read this warning before I even started the project.  And I ignored it.

Here are my overprocessed, gummy potatoes:

As you can see, they will not pour.  Honestly, though, they didn't look all that nasty.  Just, whipped, is all.  Because I kept on whipping them up.  Even though I knew they would be overprocessed in one single second, I just kept pulsing the machine and dumping in more broth, hoping to make liquid potato.  It was not so.  And of course, all of the mash wouldn't fit in the processor at once, so I did this over and over and over with each blob.

I began to spread the whipped up 'taters very thinly on my dehydrator trays, which of course are annoyingly round, because I do not have the fancy $300 Excalibur (saving my pennies).  I use parchment paper for these sorts of jobs, and each time, I have to cut it into a donut shape.  Anyway so I covered all five trays, and then realized that I hadn't even used up a third of my potato whip.  The paper was crinkling from the moisture and it was impossible to spread the stuff evenly.  And I had a terrible stomachache.

But you know, a dehydrator really can't do anything but dehydrate the crap you put in it, so, lo and behold, a few hours later, my thin sheets of potato whip were getting crispy.  I flipped them over, passed out, then woke up at 5am to break up the sheets and put them into bags.  Potato flakes!  That is, flakes of 100% potato with no weird preservatives and crap, except I guess whatever is in the broth.  Or, potato bark, invented by the Backpacking Chef and almost totally screwed up by me!  (I don't have pictures of them in flake form.  It was 5am.)

Having a bag of actual flakes of potato renewed my confidence, so I spread out the rest of the goo on the trays, much more thickly in order to use it up.  Once again, like magic, the goo turned into crispy sheets, and I crushed it up and asked my campfire expert to do the first recipe test.  A handful of ground turkey, a handful of dried vegetables, and a double handful of potato with equal parts water made a nice little stew over the campfire that is our gas stove.  Okay, well, it suffered a little in the seasoning department, since I didn't put nearly enough beef broth and Worcestershire, so when I packaged up the appropriately sized meals...

...I made sure to mark them Needs seasoning / hot sauce!!

Shouldn't be a problem.  Last time I went backpacking with this hot sauce addicted guy who I live with, we were eating out of the same pot, and I made him hold onto his Cholula bottle and shake it onto his individual spoonfuls, so that my own bites would be safely un-spicy.  But it seems he's influenced me in certain ways over the years.  I can handle a few jalapeno slices with seeds, and when I make tuna salad I squeeze in a little sriracha.  Not to mention all the other stuff: the IPAs, the Minecraft, the portobello burgers, pepperoni pizza, the idea of having chickens and goats in the backyard and getting your hands dirty, and, of course, backpacking--all these things I didn't much care for in the past.  I like a lot of things now, and I like that I like them.  This time around, out in the woods, we're going to be cooking up my homemade shepherd's pie, and I'm going to be carrying a bottle of something spicy.  And we're going to go ahead and stir it right in.

Well, in any case, it's five meals down, about thirty to go, that is if we want to be eating homemade half the nights we're out there.  Got to be done by mid-May.  Do you think I can do it??