Sunday night is always my “make something nice” night of the week. This is because I typically have all day Sunday to plan and prepare the meal. I also often invite my in-laws over for dinner Sunday night, because if I make a big meal its nice to have others to share it with so we don’t have copious amounts of leftovers. This past Sunday I decided to make dinner and dessert. I’ve posted about the dessert I chose to make, Chocolate Cherry Mousse. For dinner I decided to make mini meat loafs and twice baked potatoes.
I like baked potatoes a lot especially if they are cooked so the outside skin in crispy. However, baked potatoes can be very plain depending on how they are served. I also like mashed potatoes. So it seemed like twice baked potatoes might be a good option to blend the best of these two dishes. I chose to use a recipe from Pioneer Woman which looked super tasty and not too complicated.
A couple notes on the recipe and final product. First, I cannot emphasis how important it is to make sure your baked potatoes are thoroughly cooked. I used potato nails and cooked mine a hour but they ended up not being cooked enough which made scraping out the inside and mashing it a huge pain. It also make the final product not have the right texture. Second, If you don’t want to spend forever messing with mashing your potato insides, I’d reccommend using a food processor or stand mixer with the paddle attachment. When I’ve used my food processor for this before, I used the dough blade. It makes all this work a bit easier than a bowl and a potato masher. Lastly, you really do have options in how you flavor the inside. I ended up omitting the bacon and adding garlic chives but there are lots of different variations one can do based on your family’s tastes.