Funeral Potatoes-- My Mormon Birthright

Adventures in Cooking- A Laura style recipe

As a female member of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I have an innate ability to enjoy and create one of the tastiest and deadliest concoctions known to mankind, that is, funeral potatoes. I made a huge double batch yesterday, and boy were they yummy. It combines the most processed of foods in the kind of yummy campy mormony mess that I find so culturally interesting. Call it a heritage dish if you will. Crunchy, cheesy, tangy, mmmm... I didn't really use a recipe, but here's what I did--

I took two big bags of frozen hash brown potatoes and threw them into a mixing bowl. Then I discovered that my mixing bowl was not big enough to hold all the potatoes AND mix anything in with them. I looked around my kitchen until I found another not-big enough mixing bowl, and split them in half. I have a big-enough mixing bowl, but it is so big it lives in the attic. That means that I would have had to climb up in the attic to get it out, and then wash it, and I didn't have any clean towels with which to dry it (I didn't say I was that good of a Mormon woman), so I winged it with the two smaller bowls.

Then I dumped a huge can of Campbell's cream of chicken soup, a big tub of sour cream, and a whole bunch of really sharp cheddar cheese (broke Marty's food processor in the process of grating it), and about 1 stick of melted butter into the first bowl and started mixing it up, then I had to slowly transfer from one bowl to the other until everything was mixed together. This made a huge mess as I dropped half the ingredients on the counter. Then I realized that I left out the onion, so I chopped one up and sauteed it in olive oil until it was just starting to look clear. I had to re-start the process of transferring everything around until I could get the onion mixed in. While I was doing this, I remember to put salt and pepper in too.

Once I had everything good and mixed, I had to dig out my big casserole dishes, which are at the bottom of the hall cupboard underneath a whole bunch of other stuff. I had to call Marty over to help me to prevent being crushed under an avalanche of various dishes, at which point he sighed, because he wanted to eat his lunch. So I crabbed at him about having a small kitchen with nowhere to store anything as retaliation for that sigh.

We managed to extricate the biggest casserole dish out of the cupboard, and I filled it up with the funeral potatoes concoction. After a certain point, I realized that it was not going to fit in just one dish, and I had to go pull out the second biggest casserole dish from the bottom of the aforementioned bunch of stuff. This time I didn't ask for help because I didn't want to hear the sigh again. After a little while I was able to balance out the potatoes to fit into the two casseroles and it was time to make the crunchy topping.

I poured about two cups of cornflakes into a big Ziploc bag, at which point I proceeded to squish them by hand. I could have done this in my food processor even though I broke it because the blade attachment still works, but it is very satisfying to squish them yourself, especially when you are still grouchy from your husband's hunger-induced sigh and subsequent snippiness. I didn't quite have enough for my two giant casserole dishes, so I had to add more (of course in the process I spilled cornflakes everywhere because the inside bag had refused to open along the seam, so the cornflakes came out of the box all willy-nilly).

Once I had the cornflakes sufficiently squished, I put them in one of the two big mixing bowls (not yet washed) and dumped melted butter over the top of them, stirring them around until they were all buttery. I spread them over the top of the casseroles and then wrapped them up and popped them in the fridge. Finally I could eat my sandwich (which Marty had made for me while I was cooking despite my retaliation for the sigh). After lunch I washed the dishes (left them out on the counter to dry) and swept the floor.

Later when it was time for dinner, we took them to the family party and popped them in the oven at 375 degrees until they were all bubbly and brown around the edges (about 40 minutes). They were definitely a big hit of the evening. Good thing I made a lot because I saw people taking entire heaping platefuls of just potatoes (of course my own kids didn't touch them), and there were enough left for me to take some home for lunch today.