Monday, December 22, 2008

Flamin Baked Potato with Mushroom Sauce

I have a weird car wreck relationship with Paula Deen's show. I mostly watch it just so I can collect creepy Paula quotes ("I can't wait to wrap my lips around it!" "Come on over here and stick your head in this oven, y'all!") and to prove that her disgustingly fatty and meaty recipes can be made veggie and less fatty.

Her Jacket Potato with Bacon, Mushroom, and Peppercorn Sauce recipe worked out pretty well except for the peppercorns. I had a feeling replacing green peppercorns with black ones wouldn't be a good idea, but I wasn't about to go out and get new peppercorns when I already had perfectly good ones. Apparently peppercorns are green when they haven't started to ripen yet so they're more mild than the black ones. The black peppercorns weren't completely inedible but they were sorta crunchy and way too strong for me. The sauce was a bit thin because I used soy milk instead of heavy cream (is it just me or did there used to be a soy cream that wasn't sweetened so it was more like heavy cream than creamer?) but I don't mind thin sauce. I replaced the bacon with Yves Canadian Bacon and used Earth Balance instead of butter but other than that I pretty much just followed the recipe.

Oh, and the most important part: flambeing. I was all ready for a huge flame so I took all necessary safety precautions and poured the brandy into a measuring cup first, took the pan off the stove before pouring it in, lit the fumes at the edge of the pan with a long match and had a big pot lid on hand in case the flame got too big. But the flame ended up being tiny and only lasting for a few seconds... see for yourself

No comments: