Welcome back to Ground Hog Day! Bill Murry's movie, Ground Hog Day, prompts this family to celebrate the holiday as "Do-over Day"! On Ground Hog Day I take a favorite recipe and do it again. Shepherds pie is this year's repeat dinner. It's a kid favorite, - last night my children ate 2nd and 3rd helpings of this mashed potatoes over ground beef and vegetable comfort food. So that counts as do-overs for them and comfort for me.
Holidays provide marvelous opportunity to play with food. And the whole silliness of Ground Hog Day cannot be missed! Time to cook with kids! I envisioned our edible ground hogs on top of the shepherds pie looking like they had just risen from their snow-covered burrows to assess the state of winter. My 10-year-old is always game to play with food, but together we met our match in carving potato ground hogs. We had lots of do-overs. Now potatoes might look like they can be easily carved into ground hogs, - russet potatoes are the right color, they're firm and generally oval-shaped. But such is not the case. Click on "continue reading..." for more of the story.
The shepherds pie is easy to make. Just click for my post with the shepherds pie recipe I found in The Cancer Survival Cookbook by Donna Weihofen and Christina Marino. I originally made it as a comfort food, and it's a good one! But the potato ground hogs were trickier.
I started with finger potatoes specially selected for their resemblance to ground hogs. As I assembled the pie, Lauren began carving these. Her first effort resulted in a finger potato whale, with distinctive flippers. I made mental note of this should we embark on an aquatic-cooking project. She moved up the evolutionary time-line; her next potato looked like a penguin, the next, - a barn owl. She was having lots of do-overs, but also getting frustrated. She seized a regular-sized baking potato and began carving as I rambled about seeing the negative space and setting the ground hog free who is locked within the starch. I got that look that dared, "Show me."
Her larger potato was her best effort yet, so I tried to give it ears and arms. Now when you see living ground hogs on the ground, they don't look much like they have necks. But in truth, they are quadrupeds and do indeed have necks. I focused on giving her ground hog a neck. Carving necks out of potatoes is challenging for me. You see the result in the picture. Two black peppercorns serve as eyes. I stuck this ground hog in the pie and baked it.
While waiting for dinner to cook, I took up the finger potatoes and tried carving them. I got a Labrador retriever out of one. The others were unnamed species that died out before humans emerged. As I worked on my potato ground hog do-overs, Lauren took up another large potato. Her final effort was probably our best, although it does have a striking resemblance to the plastic bear that shoots honey out of its head.
Okay, so what's the upshot? Why would you want to carve species of the animal kingdom out of potatoes? Number 1: It's fun. Number 2: It's cheap entertainment for kids. Think how much you spend on those Nintendo DS games. Potatoes are far cheaper. Number 3: Carving shows you exactly how poor a sculptor you are and prompts you to pay better attention in art class. And lastly, number 4: Sculpting all the do-over ground hogs means you spend LOTS of quality(?) time with your kids in the kitchen. And that's a lot of fun!
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