In My Mother's Kitchen: Hot Wheels
As I mentioned last time, my childhood home backed up on a field. Most years that field was planted in some variant of wheat, which is the major cash crop by far in North Dakota. Only once can I recall that it was planted in potatoes, which were another big crop when I was a kid. The year with the potatoes led to the discovery of my one (and so far only) allergy. I was playing outside on a day when the farmer was spraying the field with some kind of pesticide or herbicide. I ended up developing a rather ridiculous set of hives, enough for my mother to actually call the doctor. Fortunately, one antihistamine cleared up the hives very quickly. After the harvest that year, my mother led us into the fields with buckets, where we found a great many potatoes that had been missed. We picked up many, many pounds of potatoes, which were washed off and stashed in our pantry. Those potatoes lasted through most of the winter, or so I remember.
The pantry itself was fairly impressive. It was a small room in the basement under the stairs, one of only two rooms in the entire house that didn't have a window. It had been outfitted with shelves from ceiling to floor on one side, and my mother regularly stashed hundreds of canned and bottled good on those shelves, not to mention assorted cardboard boxes as well as onions and potatoes and the yearly twelve pack of soda on the cold concrete floor. It was a regular occurrence for my mother to holler for me or my sister to go downstairs and grab something from the shelves that she needed to make dinner that night.
As far as potatoes are concerned, we regularly had baked potatoes with dinner. My mother was enamored of her microwave, so she often baked them in there, but she also used the toaster oven depending on what was being cooked that night. These were served with margarine; sour cream and other such toppings were rarely used in our house. As far as other potatoes meals went, she sometimes made au gratin potatoes from a box, usually when said box was on sale, or preferably on sale with a coupon ("Mom had a coupon" is a long running joke in my family for any purchase that's outside of the ordinary). We didn't do mashed potatoes very often, usually only on holidays.
The other big potato meal was another side that Mom called Hot Wheels Potatoes. I assume she got that name from a recipe in a magazine, as she didn't start making these until well after my sister and I had lost interest in the toy cars, and I can't imagine she called them that to make them more appealing to kids.
Hot Wheels
2 medium potatoes
1 Tbsp margarine
Salt
Pepper
Cayenne Pepper
Slice potatoes into 1/4" slices.
Melt margarine in glass pan in microwave oven.
Coat both sides of potatoes in melted margarine (can also use butter-flavored no stick spray).
Overlap potatoes in bottom of container in one layer.
Sprinkle with your choice of salt, pepper or cayenne pepper to taste.
Cover container with plastic wrap; poke 3 or 4 small holes in plastic wrap to let steam escape.
Microwave on full power for 5 minutes.
Uncover and microwave on full power for 2 more minutes or until potatoes are fork tender.
Serve immediately.
This obviously makes a good side that goes with most proteins.
I should note that this recipe explicitly calls for margarine. My mother was interested in nutrition long before it became mainstream, and in the 1980s fat was bad, and therefore butter was rarely used in our house. We had margarine all the time. As for myself, I always have butter around and the only time I buy margarine is when I make my mother's chocolate chip cookie recipe, which doesn't taste quite right to me when I use butter.
I have one last personal story about potatoes. I lived at home for a few months after I graduated from college and worked at a temp agency. I pulled one all nighter at the scale house for Simplot, a company that makes various potato products for wholesale - think french fries for restaurants. During the height of the potato harvest they wanted people at the scale house at all hours, as the harvest runs at all hours. As it happened, that particular night only 3 or 4 trucks came in. Running the scale was simple; you just pressed the button and handed over the receipt, so that was some of the easiest money I ever made. I didn't even need to be awake; the guys driving the trucks honked the horn when they pulled on to the scale, and it always woke me up.
Nowadays I don't know how many potatoes they grow in our part of the Red River Valley. The last few years that my parents lived there it had gotten warmer (well, relatively) and wetter, which made growing potatoes more challenging. Many of the fields had drain systems installed, which was very unusual when I was a kid, and the potatoes had mostly moved to the northern end of the valley, to be replaced largely by corn, which was not commonly grown near us growing up.
The pantry itself was fairly impressive. It was a small room in the basement under the stairs, one of only two rooms in the entire house that didn't have a window. It had been outfitted with shelves from ceiling to floor on one side, and my mother regularly stashed hundreds of canned and bottled good on those shelves, not to mention assorted cardboard boxes as well as onions and potatoes and the yearly twelve pack of soda on the cold concrete floor. It was a regular occurrence for my mother to holler for me or my sister to go downstairs and grab something from the shelves that she needed to make dinner that night.
As far as potatoes are concerned, we regularly had baked potatoes with dinner. My mother was enamored of her microwave, so she often baked them in there, but she also used the toaster oven depending on what was being cooked that night. These were served with margarine; sour cream and other such toppings were rarely used in our house. As far as other potatoes meals went, she sometimes made au gratin potatoes from a box, usually when said box was on sale, or preferably on sale with a coupon ("Mom had a coupon" is a long running joke in my family for any purchase that's outside of the ordinary). We didn't do mashed potatoes very often, usually only on holidays.
The other big potato meal was another side that Mom called Hot Wheels Potatoes. I assume she got that name from a recipe in a magazine, as she didn't start making these until well after my sister and I had lost interest in the toy cars, and I can't imagine she called them that to make them more appealing to kids.
Hot Wheels
2 medium potatoes
1 Tbsp margarine
Salt
Pepper
Cayenne Pepper
Slice potatoes into 1/4" slices.
Melt margarine in glass pan in microwave oven.
Coat both sides of potatoes in melted margarine (can also use butter-flavored no stick spray).
Overlap potatoes in bottom of container in one layer.
Sprinkle with your choice of salt, pepper or cayenne pepper to taste.
Cover container with plastic wrap; poke 3 or 4 small holes in plastic wrap to let steam escape.
Microwave on full power for 5 minutes.
Uncover and microwave on full power for 2 more minutes or until potatoes are fork tender.
Serve immediately.
This obviously makes a good side that goes with most proteins.
I should note that this recipe explicitly calls for margarine. My mother was interested in nutrition long before it became mainstream, and in the 1980s fat was bad, and therefore butter was rarely used in our house. We had margarine all the time. As for myself, I always have butter around and the only time I buy margarine is when I make my mother's chocolate chip cookie recipe, which doesn't taste quite right to me when I use butter.
I have one last personal story about potatoes. I lived at home for a few months after I graduated from college and worked at a temp agency. I pulled one all nighter at the scale house for Simplot, a company that makes various potato products for wholesale - think french fries for restaurants. During the height of the potato harvest they wanted people at the scale house at all hours, as the harvest runs at all hours. As it happened, that particular night only 3 or 4 trucks came in. Running the scale was simple; you just pressed the button and handed over the receipt, so that was some of the easiest money I ever made. I didn't even need to be awake; the guys driving the trucks honked the horn when they pulled on to the scale, and it always woke me up.
Nowadays I don't know how many potatoes they grow in our part of the Red River Valley. The last few years that my parents lived there it had gotten warmer (well, relatively) and wetter, which made growing potatoes more challenging. Many of the fields had drain systems installed, which was very unusual when I was a kid, and the potatoes had mostly moved to the northern end of the valley, to be replaced largely by corn, which was not commonly grown near us growing up.