Potato, Potato

In case you didn't know, my husband has a bit of an addiction...to growing vegetables.  Not just a few vegetables.  Mass quantities of wide variety of vegetables.  Remember all that salsa we made the other day?  Well, he went out last night to pick "a few" more tomatoes, and this is what our kitchen looked like when he came inside an hour later.

Those are what was left after he bagged up all the tubs of tomatoes he was taking to work.

Of course, we don't just plant tomatoes.  This year, he planted 5 rows that were each 75 feet long of red and yukon gold potatoes.  Needless to say, we ended up with a LOT of potatoes.  About 140 pounds of potatoes.  Of course, he didn't let any go to waste...

Do you see all the teeny, tiny potatoes in that bucket?  I can't believe he spent the time picking up every single one, but then again, this is my husband we're talking about.

Being Irish-Catholic, we certainly do enjoy potatoes, but two people can only get around so many.  We were planning on unloading quite a few of them to my poor college brother whose diet consists largely of potatoes prepared a variety of ways, but he decided to turn his two month internship in Indonesia into a 5 month gig, and I didn't want to keep bags of potatoes for him until the end of October.  Therefore, I decided we needed to get creative on ways to preserve potatoes.  Enter one of my favorite kitchen tools we ever purchased...

The food processor.  In thinking of ways that we eat potatoes throughout the year, hash browns immediately came to mind.  We love having people over for brunch and making breakfast casseroles, but we always buy the hash browns at the store.  However, my theory is always why buy something when you can make it?!?  I found the shredding attachment, washed the potatoes, ran them through the food processor, and made perfectly shredded hashbrowns!

I put them on cookie sheets to flash freeze them.  Once they're frozen, I put them in freezer bags and toss them in the deep freeze.  By flash freezing them, they shouldn't freeze together in one big clump in the freezer bags.  Notice how I ended up with my three biggest cookie sheets full?  Well, that only used 1 bag of potatoes, so I have a lot more to go.  I better get creative again!  I'm thinking next I will slice some in to steak fry size wedges and freeze them.

Big thanks to little Miss Madeline who took a nice nap in her swing which allowed me time to get those potatoes shredded and in the freezer :)