#I'm reheating some mashed potatoes in the oven but I don't want to eat JUST potatoes

[iwanttobepersephone]

How do I make bacon

[copperbadge]

@scifigrl47: King Arthur Baking Company has a new “loaded baked potato” pizza recipe and I kind of want to try it.

Me: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

@scifigrl47​: Nobody issued any kind of chall -- 

Me: THIS RECIPE IS WRONG

That’s not verbatim how it went down but it’s more or less what happened. I’m sure it’s actually a fine recipe, I have yet to get a stinker from KA Baking, but I don’t like straight un-mashed potato and I didn’t like cheddar as the only cheese on a pizza, so I decided to design my own. 

[ID: A photograph of a pizza baked in a cast iron pan, sprinkled with seasoning, with bacon visible here and there; the two kinds of cheese are both golden-brown from the oven.]

The modified KA Baking pizza recipe I use creates two deep-dish cast-iron crusts, so I made one full-on experimental potato pizza and one relatively normal pizza.

First, I let the dough rise in the pan and then gave it a very light sprinkling of mozzarella cheese. I added my usual pizza sauce to half, and left the other half sauceless. I took cold instant garlic mashed potatoes (I don't want to hear it, instant mash is fast and comes out perfect every time) and sprinkled broken up bits of it all over the pizza, then sprinkled cooked bacon bits over that.

I covered half the pizza with sharp cheddar and half with low-moisture part-skim mozzarella (my pizza cheese of choice), arranged so that there were four quadrants: sauced-cheddar, sauced-mozzarella, unsauced-cheddar, and unsauced-mozzarella.

[ID: Two photos of the same not-yet-baked pizza, one without cheese so the potato and bacon is visible, one with cheese, to demonstrate how it's half-and-half cheddar and mozzarella.]

The other pizza, I used pizza sauce on the whole thing, mozzarella cheese on the whole thing, then half I sprinkled with sauteed diced mushrooms (a personal favorite) and half I dolloped with mashed potato and tomato-onion jam.

[ID: A pizza in a cast iron pan, dotted with red sauce and mushrooms, with chunks of mashed potato here and there, brown at the edges.]

That one'll eat well regardless, I feel.

Anyway, I baked them at 450 for 15 minutes, and the experimental pizza came out of the oven looking fine, so I sliced it and taste-tested each slice.

[ID: Two images of the same experimental pizza; it is sliced in four quarters. In the second image, each slice has one giant bite taken out of it, right at the point, so that it looks like the pizza has a hole in the middle of it.]

I live alone, if I want to take a bite out of every slice of pizza, it's fine.

Anyway, my tasting notes are thus:

-- I still prefer mozzarella to cheddar. Cheddar gets kind of nasty when it melts open like this. Crunchy and oily, not a fan.

-- The bacon bits were either too large or shouldn't be there at all. I'm not a fan of bacon on pizza for texture reasons; the bacon should be a flavoring, I think.

-- It needs sauce. It just does. Mashed potatoes straight onto pizza crust is too much dry stuff at once. The mozzarella helps, but only so much. The pizza sauce, while it did add a nice texture, was not the right flavor for the potato. I think instead of pizza sauce, a bacon-ranch sauce would be ideal, incorporating the bacon flavor without adding too much crunch.

-- A perfectly nice pizza, but like, there's no reason to do this other than novelty. Arguably just making 'tato skins would be easier. Still, it's a fun thing to serve at a party or something.

I did have some leftover bacon so I made a bacon-onion sauce out of sour cream, a tiny bit of milk, the remaining bacon, and a generous spoonful of dried onions.

[ID: A sour cream cup with a fork in it; the cup is about half-full of a sour cream sauce with red and green flecks of bacon and onion.]

I'll try dunking the reheated pizza in it and see how that goes. But I'm willing to call this a qualified success. Eminently edible, and it was fun to do!

[thefoodarchivist]

Hi so I was thinking about buying a bunch of squash and other veggie and just roasting them in the oven to have during the week....how do I season them for all occasions in one go? How do I store them so they don't get squishy or anything like that? What's the best way to reheat them? Sorry for the questions but I'm gonna try something new to make my diet a bit healthier. 🐹🐭

Hi friend! I do exactly what you describe pretty much every week and roast up a bunch of potatoes/sweet potatoes/winter squash and veggies to keep in the fridge. They last about half a week in the fridge I’d say.

I make up a big tray of Mediterranean veggies like red/yellow/orange bell peppers, courgettes, aubergine, mushrooms and red onion, although you could try adding asparagus, baby corn, carrot, cauliflower or broccoli as well. I would typically use a little coconut or olive oil, black pepper and sea salt the sprinkle with oregano and smoked paprika. Or, other times I might use a splash of lemon juice and cayenne/chilli flakes, or a drizzle of balsamic vinegar and some Herbs de Provence.

Winter squash (golden butternut, kabocha or queen squash are my favourites) just gets chopped up into pieces and baked plain, to use in place of potatoes. You can also just hack the squash in half, remove the seeds and bake it in its skin- which takes a lot longer but the middle then goes all soft and fluffy like mashed sweet potatoes when you scoop it out. Yum!

I keep both roasted veggies and baked squash, once cooked, in glass containers in the fridge and they keep just fine like that. They won’t stay as crispy as when they first come out of the oven I’m afraid but you can just reheat them in the microwave when you want to eat them. They still taste just as great and can be added to salads, rice or pasta dishes, for example. Also great cold in a lunch box; perhaps you could make up a nice meal with hummus, pita bread and your roasted veggies on a bed of fresh spinach for example?

Hope that helps. Hurrah for having a delicious veggie stash! 😋