Texas Armadillo Tater Tots and "Special Sauce" Ranch Dressing

My husband has been in a potato mood lately, and frankly, I'm getting a bit sick of plain old IPot steamed spuds with Golden Gravy and veggies on the side and wanted to make something different but still easy enough to make.

Enter the Esselstyn family instead of the McDougall one.

Here are the potatoes I'm making:

Texas Armadillo Tater Tots
makes 18 tots

18 red baby potatoes (or any color)
1 cup (8 ounces) hummus
1/2 to 3/4 cup water
2 tablespoons Cajun seasoning

Preheat oven to 425ºF and line a baking pan with parchment paper.

Slice most of the way through each potato at 1/4 inch intervals (Hasselback).

In a food processor, combine the hummus, water, and 1 tablespoon of the seasoning and blend well. Place this into a bowl.

Put all the potatoes into the bowl and stir to coat each potato and get the seasoning mix to sneak down into the wedges of the potatoes.

Place the potatoes on the lined pan and pour the remaining mix over them.

Bake until the potatoes are thoroughly cooked, about 45 minutes or longer, depending on the size of the potato. They should be tender in the middle and crispy outside.

Serve with ketchup or Rip's Ranch Dressing.


Engine 2 Cookbook
page 108

Of course, I used the Esselstyn's Our Hummus.

Our Hummus
From the book by Ann Crile Esselstyn and Jane Esselstyn. "The Prevent and Reverse Heart Disease Cookbook."

1  (15 oz) can no salt added chickpeas, drained and rinsed
2 large cloves garlic
2 T. fresh lemon juice
1 1/2 T spicy brown mustard
freshly ground black pepper to taste.
1/4 teaspoon salt (optional)

  In food processor, combine the chickpeas, garlic, lemon juice, mustard, and pepper to taste. Add salt if desired and 2 T water and process until smooth. Serve immediately.

Variations.: Top with Caramelized onions, blend in cooked sweet potato, or add green onion.

But when it came to the ranch dressing, I didn't want Rip's because it contains cashews. Instead, I went for a ranch dressing from the McDougall forums:

Special sauce
post by Alvah » Tue Oct 06, 2015 5:14 pm

I'd like to share my version of a ranch dressing I use all the time, in salads, on baked potatoes, over vegetables, in panini. I modified the recipe by omitting the dill and jalapeño and adding a few other things.

Process in food processor:

2 green onions
1 package low fat silken tofu
1 t seasoned rice vinegar
1 t onion powder
1 t garlic powder
1 t salt
1 t sugar
2 t mild curry powder
1/3 c nutritional yeast
1/2 c low calorie plant milk

Yummy!

Yes, I had tofu! Last week I noticed our grocery store changed the endcap in the "healthy" section from chips and cookies to assorted other foods, from organic pickle relish to organic Kosher jelly, assorted fizzy waters (organic, of course), and there, behind some organic chocolate bars, I noticed the familiar lilac of the MoriNu Lite silken tofu box peeking out! There were 2 of these beauties hiding back there! Just when I had given up hope that this tofu would ever reappear in the United States again (It's been sold out everywhere since March), I was blessed with these! Just in time (OK, maybe a little late) for summer salad season! I had no idea exactly what I was going to do with them, but I grabbed them. The expiration date is next month, but I'm sure I can use the other one next week in one of Mary McDougall's recipes, like a potato salad. 

As for Alvah's recipe, since I haven't had ranch dressing in a long, long time, I can't really say how close this came to it, but I do know I'll be making this sauce again. Next time, though, I'll either reduce or skip the salt entirely and use half the curry powder. It is a great tasting sauce, though.

The execution . . .

Well, some mistakes were made.

I made the hummus a bit too thick. By the time I was ready to use it, it was as thick as clay and just as difficult to use. Because of that, I wound up using too much water in the armadillo sauce. Since I had a bag of 40 of those tiny potatoes, I planned on making double the sauce. Two cups of the hummus went into the food processor. I reached for the Cajun seasoning and saw I needed to open a new jar. There were 2 jars in my spice box, 2 different brands, neither the one I just finished. I opened the first and tasted it. It had a weird chemical taste. Opened the other, and it was different, but not at all like the older one.  Oh, well, it’s going to have to do. In that goes into the food processor. My husband walks into the room and offers to help. I hand him the 2 cup measuring cup, tell him to double the amount of water on the paper and pour it into the machine. He does that and the water starts pouring out around the spindle! Instead of at most 1 1/2 cups of water he used 2 cups. He misunderstood what I told him to do.  You would think an 11 cup food processor could hold more than 4 cups, but you’d be wrong. I learned that last year when I tried to make that corn soup.

So, after I blended up the “batter” he cleaned the mess. It looked like hummus soup.

While he cleaned, I started in on cutting all those tiny slits in those 40 tiny potatoes.  My hands were so sore afterwards. The batter got poured into the bowl with the potatoes and I let them soak in it while the oven preheated and I got the parchment paper on the pans.

Using a slotted spoon, 20 potatoes went on each tray, and a bit of the liquified hummus got poured over each. The pans went into the oven, a timer was set for 20 minutes so I could rotate them, hubby helped clean everything up, and away we went into the air conditioned bedroom to watch TV for a few minutes. When the timer dinged I moved the trays around, reset the timer for 25 more minutes.

45 minutes came and went and the potatoes were still hard. How? These were those tiny things! Checked again in 5, then 10, and just took them out after an hour in the oven. Here’s how they looked:

Good enough. If they’re still too hard to eat I’ll nuke them, but as it turned out, most were okay enough. The few we have leftover will be eaten during tomorrow’s lunch and they'll soften up as they get nuked. The 2 pounds of cauliflower were devoured, though, as well as over half the ranch dip/dressing. The saltiness seemed to have died down a bit since I made it in the morning.

The verdict:

My husband loved every morsel of it, including some of the baked on batter that he peeled off the parchment paper. It tasted a bit like cheese crackers our son ate when younger. He liked the tiny slices that made these baby potatoes disguise themselves as Hasselback potatoes. The ranch dip, now as firm as I wish my hummus was, he declared “good” but not “great”. Even so, he already asked when I plan on making this meal again.

As for *my* opinion, if I had my druthers I wouldn’t bother with the slits and I wouldn’t bother with making these in an oven. I wouldn’t even be opposed to skipping the “batter” part, either, but the next time I will make the batter, but all by myself, so I can keep track of how much liquid it needs. Hopefully it comes out right, and the batter adds a lot of flavor, and roasting it in the oven transforms them into something magical. To me, that ranch dressing/dip made the whole meal.