I got a new toy. It was not expensive, it is simple, and it did the job as advertised! Three good things.

It's a Mastrad potato/vegetable chip maker, here's the box it came in:



I got this idea the other day when Paul came home with 2 large bags of Lays potato chips. He'd gone food shopping for his folks, and they always get a large bag of these chips. When he was at the store, these chips were on sale 2-for-the-price-of-1, so he got 2. He told me he didn't want to bring both bags over there so he was leaving one here and would take it over there next week.

Now...the thing is that I love potato chips. Potatoes have to be my favorite of all veggies on the earth, in fact. So I told him that I could not be held responsible if that bag of chips disappeared during the next week. I'm just sayin....

And it did.

Disappear, that is. Over a week I ate all of them. Paul doesn't like chips (figures, huh?). I felt so guilty but I could not control myself. This is one of my worst weaknesses.

So, I thought that if I could really learn how to make homemade potato chips here, they might not be quite so bad for me. I went looking and immediately found this baby for about $20 or so. It came last night while we were having supper. I opened it in front of Paul and he looked quizzical. I said that it would save a lot of money, and I asked him how much that bag of Lays was, and he said, "where is it?" and I said "Oh it's long gone...." He was not too happy about that.

So today was the day I tried out my new toy. And it worked great. Here is how it went. I used one Idaho russet potato, and I did NOT peel it. I like chips with the peel on the edge. I had a really cheap plastic mandoline that I'd never used before and I cut the tip off the potato and ran it over it, and it made the perfect really thin potato slice ever!

You can get this product WITH the mandoline but I didn't. I just got the two rubber cooking "plates".

Microwave chip cooker:



This is what the potatoes looked like once they were sliced up:







Chips cooking in microwave.


The directions say cook one level for 3 minutes. You can stack these things but I didn't. I'd read reviews by previous buyers that they cook better singly, so I cooked them for 3 minutes but they needed a bit more so I went to 4 minutes. That was perfect.

Finished potato chips:



I tried spraying some with Pam and a little fine salt added. But to tell the truth, these chips taste fine without anything on them! But you can jazz them up however you like. Spicy chips, salty, vinegar-y chips, whatever floats your boat.




First batch is done here:




This is three batches done:




You can see they are very thin and very crispy:




* * * * *


So there we go. I will never buy potato chips again. In the instructions it says you can make potato, carrot, sweet potato, apple, pear, or mango chips. Haven't tried fruit yet but I will one day soon. Apple chips could be interesting.

I'd say that one potato (which was medium and not large) made a total of about 80 chips if you go by the booklet that says you can fit about 20 chips at once on the rubber plate (it's called "TopChips"). The brand name is Mastrad and I found this on amazon, natch.

I think carrot chips might really be interesting next. I have a large bag of carrots lying around doing nothing at the mo....

Cheers for veggies!

Bex

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