Celebrating National Potato Day 2011 with a Potato Gratin

I don't know what is so different about this week, but it certainly hasn't been difficult finding dishes to make in celebration of national food holidays. Today of all days is the celebration of one of the easiest and most versatile starches to work with: National Potato Day. From the potato soup to potato puffs, poutine to potato salad, many easy dishes can be pulled together and under a very acceptable budget. To celebrate this year's day of the root crop I'm most familiar with, I made a potato gratin (also recognised as scalloped potatoes) with a Swiss cheese Mornay sauce (i.e., béchamel with shredded Swiss cheese). And I don't know about you, but it's tough to cook with potatoes and not have some sort of pork around; to that end, I also discovered my own way of making bacon bits... by twice frying them.

School Is Most Certainly in Session

Greetings, dear Reader! As you may have recognised, the start of the academic year has arrived and gone, bringing out the anxiety and excitement of a new year of possibilities, as well as the expected lack of time to take a break and cook. In the midst of these seemingly long time away from the blogosphere, it's surprising to realise that my last post was only three weeks ago (though I assure you I feel like I haven't sat down to write in at least a month). As can also be expected, the new year also brought about many food gatherings which resulted in me not necessarily needing to cook. To bring you all up to speed--because I have an even more exciting post in the works--I wanted to share some photos and short stories that have been filed away on my computer for far too long. ps/ The above photo is the salted caramel bacon brownie variation of the salted caramel brownie I made in late August.