Nonnie's Casserole

We celebrated Mother's Day with Don's parents on Sunday evening, and I made Smitten Kitchen's crispy potato roast.  I only had about half the amount of potatoes the recipe called for, so I added a sweet potato to the recipe and proceeded, not thinking to reduce the amount of butter and olive oil used in the recipe since I was using far fewer potatoes than required.

What should have been a very crispy, lovely dish turned into a still lovely dish of crisp potatoes that were nearly swimming in golden buttery goodness. I realized my error only after taking the potatoes out of the oven and seeing the butter oasis hedged by its stately potato border. 

I felt a little guilty presenting the potatoes with that much butter showing...especially since I was supposed to have made southern scalloped potatoes but had decided not to, at the last minute, since I can't feel good about serving my family that much fat and artery clogging hurt, no matter how tasty, more than once a year (and I had just made the potatoes for Easter). I looked and looked but couldn't find a small casserole dish to house my potatoes.

And then I remembered that a couple of years ago my mother gave me my grandmother's old casserole dish from the 1950s. It's small, presumably since people used to eat normal size portions and not vats of side dishes. I lifted the taters as carefully as I could, though some fell.

The dish was perfect and it was nice to carry something of Nonnie's on Mother's Day. She was such a wonderful grandmother. She always had glass canisters filled with different candies in her cupboards. My sisters and I each have some special dishes of hers, and I'm going to make it a point to use this one more often.

In unrelated news, I had a really wonderful first mother's day. The thing about babies is that they don't understand that they get to sleep in on the weekends, and so they continue to wake up at 6:00 a.m. daily, seven days a week. Don played with William while I slept in an extra two hours (holla!) and then when I stumbled into the living room, still tired since it was just barely 8:00 a.m., there was hot coffee waiting for me. My two boys left for the market so they could make breakfast tacos and I got to stay home, lay on the couch with my crack coffee, and watch the Ghost Whisperer while they were at the store. (Yes, I said Ghost Whisperer. I netflix it. What? I like the clothes and set design.) Laying on the couch and watching TV with coffee that early in the morning (or at all, really) is not something I have done since the pre-baby days. It was a beautiful, beautiful thing.