Stuffed Potato Nightmares - Cooking Fail

My grandmother put me up to this, probably just to have a good laugh. She claimed, that by boiling and mashing some potatoes, and combining them with an egg and some flour, a dough could be made, into which you fold a filling of meat, or mushrooms, or sauerkraut. Ha.

What I ended up with was a potato mix with a texture no unlike baby diarrhea.. It more or less told me to take a hike.



I called my grandmother in panic, who told me to just add more flour, because "you can't spoil it with flour". She took it back when I told her I used 4 times the recommended amount of flour (3 tbsp). Apparently, there IS such a thing as too much flour.

Anyway. It was awful. I tried spooning the potato mix onto the griddle, placing a spoon of meat mix in the middle, and covering with another spoonful of potato mix, but it didn't cook into a solid object, like, say, a pancake, and instead would move around on the griddle, like, say mashed potatoes.. with meat and mushrooms mixed in.

My incompetence in this potato thing is compounded by the fact that, unlike my grandmother, I can't throw them into a formidable layer of oil to fry. I make do with a thin layer of olive oil on the griddle, because of my low-far cooking efforts to keep Jesse's gallbladder stones happy. May be they would fry up into one piece. But trying to flip them on the griddle was like playing with raw, clumpy pancake batter. SO gross.



Luckily, Jesse has no idea what the finished product is supposed to be like. He ate up both my sad attempts, probably trying to figure out why I'd go such a convoluted way to arrive at a really mangled shepherd's pie.

I tossed a couple into a tupperware container, and having given up pretending they are to hold any particular shape, I ate it at lunch with a spoon, like shepherd's pie.

My grandmother shared a lovely story - when she was a newlywed, her husband killed a couple chickens and left her to make them into a meal. Remembering that in the village, her mom steamed the chickens to pluck feathers, my grandmother poured boiling water into the bucket, covered it, and came back few minutes later, ready to pluck away. As she went to pull a chicken out by its leg, the leg came out, to reveal a half cooked, still inside-intact chicken. Apparently, not meal grade anymore. Turns out, the chickens are only to be briefly splashed by the hot water, and never actually immersed, until they are plucked, gutted, and soup-ready. I think it was supposed to make me feel better - which, it did. I am super glad that my first encounter with any chicken is completely defeathered. :D

I'm going to use the remaining stuffing for some vareniki (potsticker like things). Assuming I can mix up some decent dough. As for the potato mix.. since I'm not really into heavily flour-fortifed mashed potatoes, I might have to let it go. SIGH.