A Traditional Farm Life - Roasted Baked Potato Chunks

A Traditional Farm Life

By Shasta Hamilton

Greetings from Enterprise, dear friends!  This may come as a shock to you, but it’s raining again this week as I write!  Fortunately, this time I can look out our window and see our garden is fully tilled.  After somewhat helplessly watching those weeds grow for what seemed like weeks on end, the feeling of satisfaction and relief of looking out on black earth is indescribable. Let is rain!

Weed control activities have not been limited to our garden here on the farm this week. The boys spent a morning this week helping their friend and business partner Dean Hansen hoe around their 183 tomato plants.  In my mind that feat is amazing in and of itself, but in the course of the same morning they also put cages around 120 of those same plants!  This turned out to be the most difficult job, as it took two men just to get each overgrown plant into each concrete reinforcement wire cage—one to gather up the plant and the other to carefully put the cage over the top.  Some labor was saved, however, by using the bucket of a Bobcat to insert the stabilizing posts in the ground.

While I was baking cinnamon rolls this week for the restaurant, Michael packed up a crew of five children and headed to Detroit to see if some friends who grow watermelons for local Farmer’s Markets needed any help with weed control. It turned out the melon patch was in pretty good shape, so the children grabbed hoes and helped in their vegetable garden.

The children also spent some time in a local cornfield one hot afternoon this week, gathering some of last fall’s field corn for this year’s squirrels.  They are harvesting from a corner of a field that was unable to be picked last fall, and the owners have generously given the children whatever they can glean from what’s left in the field.  This time they shucked it out in the field, and have bagged up the dry ears for sale as squirrel corn at the Farmer’s Market.

We have felt the Lord’s blessing upon our home this week as I have been able to shift from restaurant duties to domestic duties around the home.  The girls and I have been engaged in a massive decluttering effort as we seek to make up for lost time away from home.

I’m also trying to make up for lost time in the sewing room.  I guess it is no surprise that as the girls get taller their dresses get shorter.  My free time on Monday was spent drafting patterns as necessary and cutting out garments to be sewn in snatches of free moments throughout the week.  Yes, it takes time and effort to sew our girl’s dresses, aprons, and bloomers, etc, but we find great joy and blessing in doing so.

We recently stumbled upon a new way to use Friday night’s leftover baked potatoes from the restaurant for a weekend meal at home.  The back of the Lipton Onion Soup and Dip Mix box had a recipe for Onion Roasted Potatoes.  While it called for raw potatoes, we substituted our baked potatoes instead. 

I saved the empty box in the pantry for future reference, and today as I went to the pantry to find it for this week’s recipe I discovered it missing.  This, friends, is the one downside I have found to our recent cleaning spree.  Certainly the one straightening up the pantry saw no need to keep an empty Onion Soup and Dip Mix box!  

Thankfully, it’s a pretty simple recipe and easily doubled for a larger crew.  The recipe would, or course, be the same if you use raw potatoes, although the baking time may be longer.

Now, you might be wondering why folks who usually cook from scratch are using convenience food.  While it might be that using a purchased dip mix doesn’t quite qualify as “old-fashioned farm food,” being thrifty and using leftovers to make something new for the family is an age-old rural skill.  Waste not, want not!

  

Roasted Baked Potato Chunks

4 leftover baked potatoes

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 pkg. Onion Soup and Dip Mix

1.  Preheat oven to 425 degrees.

2.  Cut potatoes into 1” chunks.

3.  In a large mixing bowl, combine the potato cubes, vegetable oil, and Onion Soup Mix; mix until evenly coated.

4.  Spread in a single layer on a greased baking pan.  Bake 30-35 minutes, until golden brown and crisp to your liking. Yield:  4 servings.

Copyright © 2015 by Shasta Hamilton

Shasta is a fifth generation rural Kansan now residing in Enterprise, Kansas.  She and her husband own and operate The Buggy Stop Home-Style Kitchen with their six home-schooled children.  You can reach The Buggy Stop by calling (785) 200-6385 or visit them on the web at www.thebuggystoprestaurant.com.

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