On Christmas Eve the choir performs twice, once at the 8:30 p.m. service and then again at the 11:00 service, a full-throttle bells-and-smells Eucharist. In between the two events we entertain ourselves with a potluck dinner.
Since M’hijito and I are entertaining 15 people at my house on Christmas Day and since SDXB will be spending Christmas Eve here, I cast about for something to take to the potluck that wouldn’t require much work. The crockpot is the likeliest candidate for a work-saving tool here, but I’m not fond of recipes that entail dumping canned mushroom soup (icky!) over chicken and cooking it to death. So I think I’m going to adapt and combine a couple of recipes to create a fresh variation on scalloped potatoes for the crockpot.
See the update of this recipe here.
Check this out:
2 pounds potatoes, sliced
1 large yellow onion, julienned
butter
olive oil
about 2 cups flavorful white sauce (see below)
1 cup shredded gruyère cheese
paprika or New Mexico red pepper flakes (mild)
finely chopped parsley
salt and pepper
To julienne the onion, peel it and slice it vertically, then slice again vertically, at a 90-degree angle to the original slices. Skim a frying pan with olive oil. Carmelize the onions by sautéeing them gently until they’re lovely and brown. Season mildly with salt and pepper to taste.
Grease the inside of the crockpot container generously with butter or olive oil.
Layer the sliced potatoes and the carmelized onions into the pot. Spread the white sauce evenly over the top. Dot generously with butter, then add more pepper and, if desired, salt. Cover the pot and cook the potatoes on low for seven or eight hours or on high for three to four hours. About a half-hour before serving, remove the lid and sprinkle with cheese and a little paprika for color. Replace the lid and allow the potatoes to continue cooking until the cheese is melted in. Finally, sprinkle minced fresh parsley over the top.
To make 2 cups white sauce:
See the comments for a discussion of the sauce!
4 tablespoons butter
4 tablespoons white flour
2 cups milk, or combination of milk and good chicken or beef stock
dollop of sherry
nutmeg
salt and pepper
paprika (optional)
Melt the butter in a large saucepan. Add flour and stir well to combine. Cook gently over medium-low heat until the butter and flour foam up. Don’t allow the flour to brown.
Add the stock and stir over medium-high heat until them sauce is hot and thickened. Add nutmeg to taste: 1/8 to 1/4 tsp. Add a couple tablespoons of dry sherry. Add salt and pepper to taste. A little paprika will give the sauce some extra zing.
Mwa ha ha! For the last potluck, someone got to the sign-up sheet before me and claimed the very dish I planned to bring. Last night, though, I managed to grab the sheet first. While this will not be as staggeringly impressive as Cheryl and Doug’s traditional home-smoked salmon, it should at least be reasonably tasty.
Image: Vicente Gil, Adoração dos Magos. Public Domain. Wikipedia Commons.
Let us know how/if this comes out. I have read that milk and cheese are both problematical in slowcookers, since they tend to curdle.
Hmmm…. Good point. I’d forgotten about that.
It may be better to make the sauce with broth — I happen to have a couple containers of home-made chicken broth in the freezer, and I also have more duck broth than I know what to do with.
What if you made the sauce à la mode d’un béchamel but with flour, a good rich broth, and a slug of sherry. Then near the end, add some cream; mix that around gently. I think the gruyère would hold up OK if you added a half-hour before serving, because it wouldn’t have time to break down. It wouldn’t be a traditional scalloped potato, by any means, but then one has already veered from the path with those caramelized onions.
Since we are now chatting in real time….just checked a cookbook. Recipe uses evaporated milk for the white sauce. Still includes cheese.
Interesting: recipe says to combine 2 TBS melted butter, 1/4 cup flour, 1 can evap milk in BLENDER!!!!!! Interesting. So you don’t make a white sauce.
That’s for 6 potatoes.
According to my cookbook, mashed potatoes (made the regular way on stove) can be put in slowcooker and taken to wherever. Mashed potatoes are huge hits at potlucks I’ve noticed.
Yeah, I noticed that some people are using evaporated milk in crockpots.
If you blended evaporated milk with butter and flour, the effect would be to cook the sauce (as it were) over the six or eight hours it sits in the blender. I wonder how it would taste in scalloped potatoes…isn’t it a little sweet? If you added some broth, though — say, it were 50-50 evap milk and broth — it would still be plenty savory.
The duck broth I made is kind of smokey in flavor, because of course I made it with the carcasses of smoked ducks. Thinking duck broth would be interesting, but am concerned the smokey effect could be a bit much.
Mashed potatoes would work. Since I’ll be cooking for 15 people (possibly 18, at last count!) the following day and will not get home much before 12:30 in the morning and will have SDXB underfoot, I’d like to keep the prep and clean-up work to an absolute minimum. Peeling potatoes (please: plug my garbage disposal!), dirtying a boiling pan, hauling out the mixer, and then loading up the crockpot with the stuff…hmmmm. There won’t be any room in the fridge to hold another large container of food. Other complication: SDXB dearly loves mashed potatoes and considers himself to be the reigning expert on the subject. If he sees me trying to make them, he will grab the kitchen and shove me out. Not that I wouldn’t appreciate having someone else make the stuff…it’s the prospect of cleaning up after him and then going out and buying new dishes to replace the ones he breaks that doesn’t appeal. 😉
I’ve made scalloped potatoes with kiebalsa a few times now using the traditional white sauce and adding cheese and pouring it over the potatoes in the crockpot. Never had a problem with curdling or seperating. Just my 2 cents 🙂
@ Newbie: oooohhhh that is VERY interesting! Oh, kielbasa in scalloped potatoes, what joy! Did you do a little precook of the kielbasa in, oh…say, beer?
This looks like something that calls out for experimentation. If it’s possible to use a crockpot to make scalloped potatoes in the normal way, with regular white sauce and glorious cheese, it’s a discovery that must be known to Civilization.
to funny-
Noooo I didn’t cook the kiebalsa beforehand, good idea though! But the flavor it gives to the potatoes is very yummy! I’ve used the turkey kiebalsa before also but it didn’t give as much flavor so I went back to using beef.
When I make this, I cook on Medium for about 6 hours and I just put the kiebalsa on the top of the potatoes the last 1 1/2 hours or so. I use good ole cheddar cheese and some onion and OUA-LA!
@ Newbie: OMG. This is a definite gotta-try-it! Thanks for the clue.