Making do or rather Making a Potato Dish

Wherein Mr Ullman proves he still hasn't got a hang on properly formatting these pages and Mr. Broman seems to  suggest that Mr. Ullman talks to his fridge.

One of the fun things in cooking is when you have to change what you

are doing in the middle of it. This happened to me the other night.

I had started to prep a pork meal. When I got the pork out of the

fridge I discovered that the bottom of the pork was badly freezer

burnt. I tossed that puppy out.

However, I had already started to boil the potatoes for mashed potatoes (I was trying a skin-on version) and had started the glaze I

was going to use. The potatoes could be used for anything but the half done glaze was a problem. I didn't want to toss the glaze but it

doesn't keep well.

The glaze is tasty on pork. I chop up about half an apple, some fresh chive, whatever color of chard I have, and then I dice half an onion and two cloves of garlic. I put that into the blender, add some sweet BBQ sauce and my usual two squirts of a mild horseradish sauce. Hit the chop button.

However, since the pork was out of the question what to use? I had nothing thawed. I did have a ½ pound of what a middle-brow

local-chain-owned-by-Kroger calls “cooked Shrimp-meat” (bay

shrimp).What the heck.

I turned off the heat under the potatoes to keep them somewhat firm.

I then got out the wok, put a small bit of oil in it and heated it up. Threw in the shrimp, added some fresh lemon juice and cooked the shrimp until it started to firm up. I added a couple of spoonfuls of condensed cream of celery soup and some paprika.

I put the potatoes into a mixing bowl and coarsely mashed them. I added the blender concoction and shrimp concoction with the potatoes and added some tarragon. I mixed this all together, placed it into a baking dish. I baked it for fifteen minutes at 350.

As a make do entree it was quite tasty. I think in the future I would use it as a side dish. After baking it comes out quite green. It would be a surprising tasty potato dish for a St. Patrick’s day shindig. Note after the fact that it included no food coloring.

More then a bit random....

I spent a few minutes looking up if the idiom was make do or make due.  Google seems to occasionally bless me with something totally off the wall -- second suggested link was this:  http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110206165942AAD1fpF  Felt I had to share....