Chips from scratch

After temporarily losing my mind today in the grocery store....and then coming back down to earth...my girls and I came home and cooked lunch. I say I lost my mind because I actually thought about buying a bag of potato chips! It was a big enough bag to serve us all with our sandwiches at lunch...at a cost of $3! That's when it finally sunk in. If I start to buy junk food, I will know that I've officially gone off the deep end. So the bag of chips went back on the shelf, and we made them at home from scratch.

Sometimes I go a little overboard when it comes to cooking from scratch. Today was no exception. This spring we planted a few new potatoes just to see how they'd do. We chose a nice thin skinned red potato due to its shorter growing season. When the vines start to die back, it's time to dig them up...that time came last week.

We planted 3 pounds of seed potatoes, and so far we've dug up 6 pounds. We're really pleased with this variety and I plan to keep them going through the end of the year. Here's what 6 pounds of freshly dug spuds looks like.

The first step in creating our chips was to scrub the potatoes. Since they have such thin skins, there's no need to peel them; besides, keeping the skins on makes them a health food, right?

The seasoning I use is a copycat recipe for a dry ranch mix. I used 2 tablespoons of it mixed with 1 tablespoon of dry buttermilk powder; although you could just use salt, seasoned salt, or any other seasoning you like. Have the seasoning ready to dust the chips as soon as they come out of the fryer.

The slicer I use is very inexpensive and works very well. It cuts the potatoes to just the right thickness.

Don't they look nice? This is one potato sliced. We used 3 potatoes for chips today.

We set the deep fryer at 375º and did them in 4 small batches...

And fried them until they were crisp and golden.

Of course you can't eat chips by themselves and call it lunch. We made some bread, chicken salad, and some collosal sandwiches!