Dear Reader,
Cleary we are awesome. Please enjoy this next installment, which happens to come immediately after our last installment, free of charge. And you better enjoy it as much as you can. Who knows when we’ll post again?
Indubitably Yours in Crockering,
Emily and Mike
# 8 - Happy Traveler Sing-Along
Opening Remarks.
This recipe in the section “Foods That Go Places,” and is actually a recipe In Disguise. We’ve definitely seen this card in the deck a few times, but the only thing that caught our eye was the title: “Happy Traveler Sing-Along.” “Huh,” we’d say, “that’s a weird name for a recipe. But it looks like doughnuts. Probably nothing special.” And we move on.
But recently Emily, intrigued by the prospect of a Happy Traveler Sing-Along, actually took the time to read through the recipe on the back. It is in fact, a recipe for doughuts. POTATO doughnuts.
Curiously, no further mention of happiness, travelers, or singing is made on the back of the card. So just what is a Happy Traveler Sing-Along? Perhaps we’ll magically understand when we eat the doughnuts.
Making It.
Emily: Ok. OKOKOKOKOK. THIS recipe is amazing. Yes it’s doughnuts! But they are made out of instant mashed potato flakes. AMAZING. Also - I’m much more awake than last time. I hope to actually be able to make sentences this time.
I am just so intrigued by this concoction that I can’t wait to try it. Mike is making me wait because he’s watching the last 19 minutes of his John Adams biographical film (hahaha). So I will just keep writing about how excited I am. Also, we need a deep fryer. But we don’t have one of those, so we will be concocting one. EXCITING. I wish Ryan Perry was here to enjoy the frying with us.
The actual recipe card called for “Potato Buds Instant Puffs” and, loving a challenge in the grocery store, we set out to find these magical buds. You could say we were a bit surprised to enter the instant mashed potato section of the grocery store aisle and find “Betty Crocker Potato Buds” in a dusty box on the top shelf. Holy crap Betty, when you meant Potato Buds, you really weren’t kidding. You invented these things! Sorry we made fun of you.
(19 minutes later)
Mike: The end of John Adams was really sad and emotional. First his daughter Nabby died of breast cancer, then Abigail died, and then Thomas Jefferson and Adams both died. I’ve been crying my eyes out for the past hour. Clearly I’m not the Happy Traveler Betty Crocker envisioned for her Sing-Along. I’ll try my best to rally, though.
Emily: We’ve got some ingredient substitutions happening tonight. We don’t have enough flour, so we’re going to substitute a little bit of whole wheat flour. And then it says in the ingredients that you only need Potato Bud Instant Puffs, but then on the recipe card that you need to actually follow the recipe for making Instant Puffs on the Potato Buds box, which requires milk. But we don’t have milk, we have Dairy Ease.
Mike: Dairy Ease is milk, just w/out lactose (I’m lactose intolerant).
Emily: We add milk to the Potato Buds, and it smells awful. Like butthole, and cardboard, and wet cardboard.
Mike: I really don’t think it smells like anything at all—
Emily: Mike is rallying and throwing ingredients into the mixing bowl. It kind of feels like a race. It’s very exciting.
I have Mike break the three eggs into a separate bowl so that if one is bad, it doesn’t taint the other ingredients. He proceeds to break all three eggs into the same bowl so it doesn’t really matter anyway. Also it was a cat food bowl. We are classy.
The shortening is clumping up in the mixture so we read the recipe card and it says beat thoroughly. Oh boy. We’re getting into heavy duty baking mode.
Mike is upset about the clumping. I think he’s still sad about John Adams.
Emily: The dough is really really soft and brown (I’m not sure if it’s supposed to be this brown, or if that’s because of the whole wheat flour.) Also, I feel like all the ingredients – eggs, flour, sugar, salt, baking powder, nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla – would make a dough anyway. So why did we need the instant mashed potatoes?
The dough has been assembled, and now we have to let it sit for 20 minutes.
Incidentally, this provides us some time to discuss our Betty Crocker honorable mention recipe: Cold Meat Morsels.
This recipe made it all the way to the final cut simply based on its picture (which is very attractively laid out), and silly name. But in the end it wasn’t picked because it’s just mini salami sandwiches. Nothing really that exciting. But we’re including it here because it deserves a place on this blog, even if we have no intention of making it. Believe us when we say that we’ve got PLENTY of amazing recipe cards still to go through in our collection, so you may be seeing additional “honorable mentions” in this space from time to time.
Aaaaand we’re back. It’s been 20 minutes, and so the dough should be sufficiently rested by now.
Mike: We get to work cutting the doughnuts. But of course we don’t own a doughnut cutter, so we use a large juice glass for the exterior, and shot glass for the hole.
Emily: Like I said, we’re classy.
Also, we jerry rig a deep fryer with just a saucepan. The recipe calls for immersing the doughnuts in about 3-4 inches of oil, but we run out of oil after only about 2 inches. So 2 inches it is.
Mike: It’s not the number of inches of oil you immerse your dough in. It’s how you use it. Or something like that.
It occurs to me at this point that we’re always running out of ingredients and altering the recipe in some way so as to suit the ingredients we have or were able to find.
Emily: It’s not that we’re not organized, it’s that we’re cooking in a modern age. We don’t necessarily have a doughnut cutter, or 18 vats of oil on hand, or a jar of crab apples. I also wonder what Betty would think of our use of whole wheat flour.
Emily drops a doughnut in. After a few minutes we get this:
Emily: Holy shit it looks like a doughnut. It’s perfect! And it smells like French fries!
We cook more doughnuts and holes. Things are going well! Mike takes note when a hole gets stuck in a nut, at which time Emily remarks that she’s surprised more sexual innuendo hasn’t come up.
Emily: Why didn’t we make these for breakfast?
Mike: It’s true. Against some odds, this is starting to work out really well. We don’t even have one of those thermometer thingies to tell us how hot the fat is getting.
(Emily: I’ll tell you how hot the fat is getting! oh!)
Eating it.
OK. This is truly a momentous occasion. As we were mixing the icing for the donuts, Mike just took a donut hole, dipped it in the chocolate frosting, and ate it. This is the first time that we didn’t have to play rock-paper-scissors to see who eats first! Then I did it!
People, they are good!!!! I can’t even believe I’m saying these words. They taste good. I will even say yummy. (In the time it’s taken to write these words, Mike has eaten 3 donut holes and has experimented with raspberry jam. I’m speechless.
Now we’re making the Chocolate Icing. We might have messed up because we bought chocolate frosting in a tub but the recipe card says dry frosting…hmmmm. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of dry frosting.
Mike asks if these are better for you than the average donut. I reply that I’m not sure and ask why he thinks that. He says they feel lighter. I think it’s his confidence returning from the abysmal depths of the pork breakfast travesty. I also think he’s forgotten all about John Adams.
Emily: Upon eating my second hole (Mike: You said second hole!), I realize that they are good but not great. A little dry and they might have a weird aftertaste. And they aren’t as good as donuts from a regular store. But they definitely aren’t bad. And that’s saying something.
We’ve created the icing and dipped the donuts. Now it’s time to let the icing set. Ours don’t look at fancy as Betty’s on the card but she didn’t tell us how to make them look like that so we are stuck with just chocolate frosting.
Closing Remarks.
Emily: These doughnuts are solid. BetBet, I don’t even know what to say. I had a good feeling about tonight from the start, but I would have never guessed that these happy traveler sing along instant mashed potato doughnuts were going to pass the test. They truly truly did. We still don’t know what you were thinking with the happy traveling singing part of this whole thing. But maybe we’ll throw one in a basket and travel with it to our friend Jess’ comedy show tonight. And then delight in her disbelief that it is a doughnut made out of potatoes and it’s actually edible. I’m a little concerned we smell too much like deep fried doughnut to go out in public. We were actually hovering over the “deep fryer” in disbelief for the last twenty minutes.
Mike: I’m just in shock right now.
You know, when Emily and I initially conceived of this project, we were thinking about all of the horrible recipes in this recipe card collection and thinking about how funny it would be to try them. Never did we actually consider that something we’d make would actually turn out good. Not good in the “we followed the recipe to a T and it came out looking just like it was supposed to, which is terrible,” or good as in “it’s midnight and I haven’t eaten in 11 hours and I’m super hungry, which is why this giant cream cheese-filled burger tastes good.” I’m talking about actually good, as in tasty, as in something we’d bring to our friend Jess’ show tonight. You might think that doughnuts would be a slam dunk. But POTATO doughnuts? C’mon. Raise your hand if you thought that would work out. Didn’t think so.
Addendum- we did end up taking a doughnut to Jess. She took one bite and said “It’s not bad” and then casually put the thing aside. Maybe they aren’t THAT good, but she finished her one and only bite so that’s saying something.
