Monday, November 15, 2004

I cooked something a week ago that I meant to blog about, and now? I've plum forgot what it was. That's part of why I keep this blog- as a log for myself of what I've cooked and what we've liked.

But, anyway. A week with not much cooking and not much cooking blogging leads to kitchen incompetency. Friday night we were thinking about going to Lala's for dinner, but me, being budget minded and also knowing I make a better chimichurri than LaLa's, me, I suggested staying home and I would.. make.. french fries to go with our steak. The Dorky Yankees make it seem so easy.

Well, first, the julienne attachment on my v-slicer makes the thinnest fries in the world. It's okay, I figured. They'll puff up when they fry. I put the potato slices in ice water in the fridge and heated up a ton of peanut oil in my big cast iron dutch oven. You fry french fries twice, and, during the first fry, the temperature dropped from 325 to 265, just like the Dorky Yankees said it would. No worries. I pulled them out when they were limp and put them in a paper bag and worked on the steak.

Then, y'all, I heated the oil again to 350 and put the fries in and-- the temperature dropped down to 250. And I couldn't get it back up. And the fries just kept shrinking and absorbing oil and not crisping. until finally I pulled them out, heated the oil to 375, and did a third fry. That worked- the temperature only dropped down to about 325, and they crisped and browned gorgeously, but-- they had shrunk, by this time, to the size of pencil erasers. And those were the biggest fries. Mostly it was just little bits of potato chip.

I had even made fry sauce (two parts mayonnaise, one part ketchup, one half part barbeque sauce) to go with them. It was so, so sad.

French fries. Don't attempt them at home.

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