scalloped potatoes

I grew up with a single working mom.  She worked long days, and making a huge dinner from scratch after a hard day at work was the last thing on her mind - she just needed to get something relatively nutritional on the table for my brother and I in as short a time as possible.  Oh, and it had to be inexpensive, because you can't be eating caviar in a single income family.  We ate a lot of potatoes and pasta, and I carry a torch for those two items to this day.  They're the ultimate comfort foods.  Often, we would have some kind of meat, and as a side we would have the boxed scalloped potatoes (or potatoes au gratin...but is there really a difference if it's all from a box?).  I love those potatoes, no joke.  LOVE. THEM.  Total guilty pleasure.  A few years back, when Richard went on tour with his band, I bought a box and ate it for dinner two nights in a row.

We haven't done scalloped potatoes since Nikola has been around, but I got a little crazy yesterday.  I had a hankering for nachos.  I looked all over Pinterest until I found what looked like a viable "cheese" sauce, and dove in.  It tasted just like that nacho cheese that Tostitos makes in the jar, you know the one, down the chip aisle.  And it's so good.  But the catch for this one?  It's good for you.  I know, I know.  The nerve of me to imply that something as stupid good as a "cheese" sauce could be good for you, but it can.  And like me, you probably won't stop at just one dish.  The recipe made a TON of it, so our nachos yesterday for gameday (GO RAVENS!) turned into scalloped potatoes tonight, because how could I not test that out?  The nachos were ok in the sauce, but the potatoes?  Heaven.  It tasted just like the potatoes out of the box, only just that much better.  The sauce was ooey gooey, just like it had cheese in it.  But not only did it have no cheese, it didn't even have a cream in it.  How, you ask?

Let's see!  Here's what you'll need:

2 C potatoes, skinned and boiled  (I actually had dried potato flakes, so I used those this time)
1 C carrots, skinned, chopped and boiled
1/2 C nutritional yeast
1 T garlic powder
1 T onion powder
lemon juice, I cut a lemon in half and squeezed just half into the sauce
1/2 C water
oil (your choice, you'll need 2 to 3 T of oil, depending on your preferred consistency)
salt, to taste
pepper, to taste if desired (I didn't use it this time, but it would be good)
(Recipe adapted from Vegan Yumminess)

You just throw all of that into the blender and voila!  Sauce.  It'll look like melted cheddar, and taste enough like cheese that it'll fool your four year old into having a mini-heart attack when you feed it to the dairy-allergic younger sibling. First we ate it mixed with salsa on tortilla chips, then we had it on nachos yesterday, then the potatoes tonight.  It took all of that just to go through the volume that the recipe made.

If you want to make the potatoes, it's pretty easy.  I sliced up 4 small-ish Yukon Gold potatoes using my mandolin, then layered them in a baking dish.  Then I added about 1/2 to 1 C of water to the sauce (it thickened up quite a bit over night) and dumped it on top, it amounted to roughly 2 cups of it.  Bake for 1 hour at 350, then broil for a few minutes to get it golden and crispy on top.  Serve warm and try to stop eating it.