Twice-Baked Comedy

Recipe: Twice-Baked Comedy

Don't worry, you aren't reading things incorrectly. And Williams-Sonoma didn't discover a new food no one has ever heard of. For today's adventure, I was to make twice-baked potatoes. I took 4 large potatoes, scrubbed and pierced them, and let them bake for 1 hour. While they were baking, I even tried to work on my time-management by doing random chores for the first 30 minutes and then cutting the shallots, preparing the spinach leaves, and shredding my extra-sharp cheddar cheese during the final 30 minutes. I was in a good zone. Close to the end of the hour, I was even thinking "Hmm, I'm not sure I'll have much to talk about tonight". The Universe always seems to find a way to address my concerns. J

With like 1 minute left on the timer, I hear this pop in the oven. I look inside, and one of the potatoes has exploded clean out of the skin. I think I just stood there in confusion for a few seconds like, "What just happened?". This has never happened to me. I did Google exploding potatoes later and found this isn't an unheard of phenomenon. I believe that is the benefit of piercing the potato, it should keep it from exploding. I actually never thought before about why I pierced them. I just knew it was what you do. I guess now I know why. Maybe I didn't pierce this guy enough. Or seriously, maybe the Universe was really throwing me a bone for my blog. It seemed to be a "fixable" solution though. The flesh of the potato was still in one piece. And the skin was too, except for where the flesh of the potato bust out of the skin. So I'm thinking, maybe I can still save it and while it won't look pretty, it would still be edible. I had 3 other potatoes I could still use as a photo op. Yeah...not so much.

As I go to grab the flesh of the potato off the rack, it then proceeds to crumble. About 2/3 of it broke into 2 or 3 smaller pieces. The other 1/3 crumbled into very small pieces and fell to the bottom of the oven. So much for my salvaging plan. At this point, I'm thinking continuing to bake in an oven with bits of potato at the bottom is probably not a good idea. The kitchen has seen more than enough smoke in it the past few days. And since I was supposed to actually scoop the insides of all of the potatoes to make the twice-baked filling of the potato, and since 25% of my twice-baked filling was now out-of-commission, I painfully made the choice to punt on this recipe tonight. This is one of those times were you can get really annoyed at the events that transpire or you can see the pure comedy of the events. I chose the latter. So...how about we talk about twice-baked potatoes Saturday? J In the meantime, enjoy the photo of my adventures with twice-baked comedy. I threw out the bigger pieces before it dawned on me I could still take a photo. So the only thing I have to share is the bottom of the oven. But, I think it still speaks for itself.