2: "I'm Feeling 22" Layers of Potatoes..
18 Days Until the Dinner - 22 layer potatoes are non-existent
It’s 12:30PM on Columbus Day. I’m sitting in a cafe writing on my lunch hour and realize something horrible - I left my 22-Layer Potato dish in the oven overnight.
If you’re new here, on the 29th of October, I will be cooking a 9-course plated dinner for my wife’s birthday. Somewhere between 6 and 16 of her friends will be at our 720-square-foot apartment to eat. The tagline on the invite is: Welcome to “en’TrAYs: a Fearless dining experience with quite the Reputation.”
Did you figure out the theme?
If you’re not a Swiftie, it’s a Taylor Swift-themed dinner.
Let me rewind a moment. Last week I put together a schedule of all the dishes I need to trial over the 3.5 weeks leading up to the en’TrAYs dinner party. Last Monday through Friday, I scheduled to test a different recipe each night.
Life got in the way - so no dishes were trialed. Finally, Sunday morning rolled around, we hit up the market and the stores to get what was needed, and I got to cooking.
I organized my day to trial the longest lead time dishes first. To kick it off, I made an intense cold brew for the basis of my Clear Espresso Martini. Then, I progressed with prepping chicken thighs to marinate in buttermilk for a baked Nashville Hot Chicken.
Next up was the 22-layer potato dish I was making to celebrate Taylor Swift’s song “22.”
If you were on the internet this past summer, you might have seen the “15-hour potato” from PoppyCooks recipe or the “1,000-layer potato” recipes blowing up. They are similar to Thomas Keller’s famous Potato Pave recipe. The critical difference between the two recipes is the type of potato used - Russet vs. Yukon Gold. I planned on trialing Thomas Keller’s Russet Potato Pave first. Then follow up with PoppyCooks Yukon Gold potatoes next. This would give me flexibility in the week leading up to the party on what produce was available.
I worked on them all day Sunday. Everything was going well, until I was blissfully sipping my coffee on Monday afternoon and was suddenly hit with the realization that I had left the potatoes in the cold oven overnight. They were ruined.
These are the potatoes that I was supposed to cut using a mandolin. But, because single-use gadgets don't have a place in my small kitchen, I had had to carefully, cut into butter-like-logs. Then, sliced the potato as thinly and as evenly as possible to create mandolin like slices.
The same potatoes that I then soaked in cream and salt and pepper. And, they are the same potatoes that I painstakingly layered, then baked at 350 for 1.5 hours, until I failed to remove them from the oven to finish cooling down in the fridge.
We’re talking about those Potatoes.
The ones still sitting in a cooled-off oven 14 hours later .
At moments like this, I like to remind myself of what a soccer coach once told me - “Failing during practice is the goal of practice. It allows us to execute better on game day. ”
With that in mind, let's get Cooking (i.e., “mandolin” slicing).