View source for Cheese 'Tatoes

There's nothing classier than turning a pile of fresh tasty ingredients into something that looks and smells exactly like the box variety of the very same dish with three times the amount of work.

Ingredients:

4 small potatoes

1 1/2 cups grated Cabot Seriously Sharp Cheddar

2 cups milk

3 tbsp butter

3 tbsp flour

salt

pepper


Tools:

1 casserole/pie pan

1 whisk

1 heat-proof rubber spatula

1 medium sized pot

tinfoil


Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Peel all the potatoes carefully, making sure that your peeler is sharp so that you don't peel off your thumb or end up catching an edge and dumping the slippery half-peeled potato into the trash (especially if your trash can has a significant cat doody content). Slice up the potatoes into thin round slices just like you see on those carefully airbrushed potato pictures on the Betty Crocker box (false advertisement due to the fact that their dehydrated potatoes never look like that coming out of YOUR oven).
Lightly lube up the casserole pan with a little bit of butter. Layer the potato slices into the lubed pan and sprinkle salt and pepper to taste (keeping in mind that potatoes absorb a good bit of salt). Put the butter-delta<small>lube</small> into the pot and carefully melt it down on medium heat. Once the butter is melted, throw in the flour and whisk while frying until it becomes a suitable roux (hey looky there, I used a french word!). Slosh in the milk and keep on stirring until the milk gets thick. As soon as the milk gets thick, toss in all the cheese at once and stir until you have a pot full of gooey cheese sauce. Pour that all over the potatoes, making sure to scrape every last drop out of the pot with the rubber spatula. Make like a British nanny and give the pan a couple good shakes from side to side to get the cheese sauce settled down to the bottom layers and cover the pan with tinfoil. Toss that sucker in the oven to bake for about 1 hour, then remove the tinfoil and bake another 15 minutes to get the top nice and browned and crispy. Voila! It should look just like the front of a Betty Crocker Instant Scalloped Potatoes box.