Snack Attack – French Fries

One thing an elimination diet does is make it hard to have snacks.  Grabbing a bag of chips is out, as is anything processed!

So I’m trying to come up with easy to make, delicious to eat snack foods.

One snack (that often pulls double duty as a side dish) is French Fries.  That’s easy enough, right?  Believe it or not, though, there’s a trick to making them delicious.

I never would have believed it, myself, until the day we lost power in my all-electric kitchen smack-dab in the middle of cooking lunch.  That day, I learned the secret: you have to fry your french fries TWICE to make them melt-in-your-mouth-yummy.

So, that’s what I do, now.  It makes it a little bit more involved, but it is SO  worth it!

Plus, you can fry the Fries the first time, then lay them on a cookie sheet and flash freeze them.  Then, the next time you want fries all you have to do is grab some from the freezer and fry them up.

It’s homemade convenience food!

In fact, I’ve been making so many French Fries lately I decided to invest in a home fryer.  I bought the Presto Digital ProFry, and I love it!  It has made lunchtime and snack time so much easier!  If you want to make fried goods at home, I strongly recommend you get yourself a fryer.  It’s worth every penny.

So here’s how I do it:

Grab a bunch of potatos, wash them, and slice them into strips.

Get your fryer hot (or the oil in your pan hot), drop in a few handfuls of fry strips.

Let them fry for about five or six minutes.  Take them out of the oil, and drain them.  In the fryer, I can rest the basket out of the oil and let it drip into the vat below.  Before the fryer, when I used a pan with oil, I drained as much as I could as I picked them up and then laid them on several layers of paper towels.

Lay them out fairly flat to let them cool a bit.  They don’t need to be cold, or even completely room temperature.  Just try to let the majority of the heat out before frying them again.  This is why it’s so great to do this ahead of time – you could, feasibly, do a big batch of these while making breakfast on a weekend, then just toss them in the fridge.  Any time a munchkin wants a snack, it would only be 5 minutes away at that point!

After they’ve cooled, toss them back in the fryer.  Let them cook for about three to five more minutes at this point.  It all depends on how crispy/brown you want them.

Drain them again, lay them out on paper towels, and they’re good to go!  To punch it up a bit, we dust them lightly with sea salt and garlic powder.  Yum-my!

One idea I may experiment with in the future, to make these even healthier and less oily, is to boil or bake the Fries the first time, and only fry them the second time for that nice crispiness.  If any of you have tried that, let us know how it turns out!

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FRENCH FRIES

-1 or 2 potatos per person, depending on size (of potato!)
-safe oil for frying
-sea salt
-garlic powder (optional)

1. Wash your potatos.  Cut them into strips.  Heat the oil in your fryer to 350 degrees.
2. Drop handfuls of potato strips into the oil.  Cook for 5 minutes or so.
3. Drain potatos, laying them out on paper towels to cool.  (At this point, you could refrigerate them for use later in the day or freeze them for use later in the week.)
4. Once most of the heat has dissipated, drop them back into the oil.  Cook for another 5 or so minutes, until they look as brown as you like them.
5. Drain, lay out on paper towels, and lightly season with sea salt and garlic powder (or whatever seasonings you like on your fries!)
6. Enjoy homemade french fries that taste better than anything at a drive-thru!

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What seasonings do you like on your french fries?  Share in the comments section!