Twice Baked Potatoes

My friend Sue gave me this Twice Baked Potatoes recipe many, many years ago. It was called Million Dollar Potatoes back then. She would cut up the final product and serve them as appetizers.

I love them, so I serve them as a side dish.  I serve them every Christmas per my daughter and nephew’s request and last Saturday night I served
them at a dinner party.  When I was planning the menu last week, my friends said I should do a dinner party column sometime – so here it is. I served these potatoes with my and everyone loved it. See the attached picture my guests let me take of them enjoying their dinner. 

These potatoes are great for a dinner party or for Christmas dinner because you can do the first baking and the preparing for the second baking the day before.  Then a ½ hour before you want to serve them, put them in the oven for their second baking. These are also great served leftover and so make a great snack or according to my daughter – a great breakfast!

6 Russet potatoes – scrubbed clean of all dirt

1 stick of butter

¾ cup of sour cream

3-5 tbsp of milk

3 cups of shredded cheese – 1 ½ cups cheddar, 1 ½ cups of Jack cheese

Olive oil, salt and pepper

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Scrub the potatoes to remove all dirt. Rub some olive oil on the potatoes, sprinkle with salt and pepper and put them in the oven, either on a cookie sheet or directly on the oven rack. Bake for one hour and then test doneness of the potatoes by piercing one potato with a fork. The fork should easily go into the potato.  Remove potatoes and let cool at room temperature for about ½ hour.

Once potatoes are cool enough to touch, cut them in half. Scoop out as much of the potato from the skin as you can and place in a large bowl. Cut up the stick of butter and put in the bowl as well. Once all the potatoes are scooped out, add the milk, sour cream, sprinkle some salt and pepper and mash the potato. I like to use my KitchenAid mixer to mash them. You want them to be a creamy consistency so you may need to add more milk. Then add 2 cups of the cheese and mix well. Now fill the skins with the potato mixture. At this point you can put the potatoes in the refrigerator and cook them later.

One half hour before you want to serve them, cover potatoes with the left over 1 cup of cheese and then bake at 350 for ½ hour.

If you are serving these potatoes with the, the chicken can also be prepared in advance and the final half hour of cooking can be done at the same time as the potatoes. Do this: sauté the chicken for just 2 minutes per side. Then place the chicken in a baking dish and let cool. Make the sauce by just sautéing the tomatoes in the skillet just a little bit – you mostly want to cook tomatoes just until all the spices are scraped of the bottom and are loose in the pan, about 5 minutes, then turn off the heat until a half hour before serving. (I’m sure there is some rule about how long these tomatoes can sit without heat and not in the refrigerator, but I don’t know what it is….)

A half hour before serving put the chicken in the baking dish in the oven with the potatoes. Get the tomatoes in the skillet to simmer and add the chicken broth to it until it is heated through. After a half hour of baking, put the chicken in a deep dish and pour the sauce over the chicken.  Now top with the feta and basil and serve.