Ick

Back when I started this blog, I promised to not only post about my baking successes, but also to share my baking flops. This is one of those. I give you potato nests:

This is a Taste of Home recipe and it looked and sounded really good, so I tried them for our New Year's Eve party. Let's just say they never made it to the table. It's not really Taste of Home's fault, I just didn't use the right stuff and they didn't turn out well. For one thing the nests were grey. Now as a general rule I don't eat grey food. The problem was that the recipe makes 24 nests but I only had 12 mini muffin cups so I had to bake half the recipe at a time. You know how potatoes kind of turn grey if they are exposed to air for too long? That happened to the grated potato that was waiting to go in the oven. Despite the unappetizing color, the nests themselves did taste pretty good. The real ick factor came in the form of the filling. The recipe says to fill them with garlic-herb cheese spread. When I went to the grocery store I was directed to this Chef Tom's garlic spread with cheese:


Apparently, this is not what the recipe was talking about. This stuff was way too salty. I'm talking knock you over salty. And it gives you really bad garlic breath. I'm thinking this might be o.k. on baked potatoes or french bread, but in a concentrated scoop like this it was nasty. Luckily we had enough left over Christmas goodies to fill up our guests without having to serve these. So the moral of the story is, if you want to try this recipe, make sure you have enough mini muffin cups and steer clear of Chef Tom.