I can find a sack of potatoes for a mere £6, and they can last me all week, providing up to 25 protions of chips, factoring in the oil at £6 this makes it 50p per portion of home cooked chips. Does anyone else peel, chip and fry their own potatoes? I'm sure there must be someone here who goes one further and grows their own potatoes, that they eventually turn into chips.
It'd take a huge tract of land to provide you with potatoes that will see you through a long period of time. If you don't have such land, it wouldn't be worthwhile to plant potatoes. Anyway, for a few weeks I'd been craving Potato chips but I live a little distance from town so I wouldn't just pop into a restaurant, order chips and . . . satisfy my craving. I chose instead to wait until I had to go to town buy potatoes and make my own chips. I realized, later, that if I peeled four large potatoes, I could make enough chips to eat and leave some left over. From that I know it's a lot cheaper if you can to make your own chips at home.
I grow sweet potatoes but I have not for the normal potatoes yet. They are actually so easy to plant and to look after. I make my own chips and I also make potato fritters. It is so expensive to buy them from the market. I chose to plant sweet potato instead because my husband loves its leaves as a vegetable.
In the US, we call chips fries, and we call crisps chips. Anyway, I do make my own fries because even frozen bags of fries aren't as cheap as cutting up some potatoes and frying them. I think they taste better homemade anyway.
I LOVE potatoes. I don't cut them and make fries anymore, what I do most of the time is cut them up and roast them in the oven. (Yum!) They are so good and roasting gives you a flavor and texture that you can't get from frying them in hot oil. I do like to make sweet potato fries sometimes, but I often cook those in the oven as well. It's more convenient since you can prepare more than one dish at a time in the oven.
I'm not against making my own chips or fries, especially if I can just leave them in the oven for some time and come back to it and have a freshly made homemade snack that doesn't have the chemicals I might be getting when I get it packed or from a fast food restaurant, but I usually just buy them from restaurants and grocery stores anyway just because I don't have a big enough oven to make as much as I'd like to and deep frying them myself is out of the question because it takes too much effort, for me personally. If I someday buy myself a big oven, however, I'd definitely be making more from home a lot more.
Actually one of the great things about potatoes is that they don't need nearly as much land as other vegetables. You can plant a huge group of them in a relatively small plot of land.
I make baked oven fries from time to time like this, but tortilla chips are much easier to make. Get some corn tortillas and cut them up into 6ths. Brush them with a little oil and sprinkle them with salt. Bake at 350 for about 12 to 15 minutes, and voila! Corn tortillas are inexpensive and pretty healthy too, so this is a great thing to know how to make. My family loves them, especially topped with some beans, cheese, sour cream, shredded lettuce, and salsa. Yum!
