Funeral Potatoes

Good Morning! Who doesn’t want to talk about funeral food first thing in the morning? 🙂

This is on my menu for Monday but yesterday morning, I woke up wanting these so I fixed them for dinner and that’s what was in the picture with the three dishes in yesterday’s post.

When Chad was a teen, he started loving to cook. He would never use a recipe and that just made me crazy. See . . now you know why I’m like I am! 🙂

He would go down to the freezer, come upstairs with chicken, green beans, corn, pine nuts and always . . curry powder. I think he used curry powder because he knew Vince didn’t like it and wouldn’t eat what he had cooked. Chad would stand in front of the spice cabinet and dig through and pull out all the weirdest spices. I still have a container of Fenugreek he shared with me a few years ago. I’m so tempted to throw it out at least twice a week but then it makes me smile. It has a handwritten label on it that Chad made. Why do I have to keep everything?

Anyway, that was 15 or 16 or so years ago and I wouldn’t have started to make something without following a recipe and if I was missing an ingredient, I would stop, go to the store and get it. I don’t do that any more.

Yesterday when I made the Funeral Potatoes, here are the changes I made . . and I made them mostly because I didn’t have what I needed.

• Several years ago, I needed frozen hash brown potatoes and didn’t have any. We almost always have frozen tater tots because we like them and now, Addie loves them. I took the bag of hash browns out of the freezer, poured about 1/3 of the bag in the air fryer and cooked them til they were almost crunchy. Then I did that with the rest of them.

• Then I mashed them up with a fork and guess what’s inside them? Hash browns!

• When making the recipe yesterday, I didn’t have enough sour cream so I used about 1-1/2 cups of sour cream and about a cup of cottage cheese.
• Long ago I decided using canned cream of chicken or cream of mushroom soup wasn’t the healthiest thing to do so now, I pretty much leave it out. I stirred in just a bit of Knorr Chicken Bouillon granules and, because it looked kinda dry, I added a cup milk. Since I left out the soup, which has a lot of salt in it, I added some salt and a bit of Cajun Redhead seasoning.
• I don’t keep corn flakes for the crunchy topping so I used Panko, which I always have.

It was delicious. Learning to venture out on my own a bit and not have to follow a recipe exactly is nice. It means a whole lot less trips to the grocery store.