Scalloped potatoes with bacon & a good ol' pot of beans

I know it's been awhile, sorry about that.  The family was traveling back home to celebrate Mother's Day.  If you are a mother I hope you had a blessed one.  Last Sunday when we arrived back home from our trip it was time to get things prepared for my Home Group on Monday night.  As you can tell my the title I was to make scalloped potatoes and beans.  The recipe I used for the potatoes was actually called scalloped potatoes and ham, well bacon makes everything better so I decided to use bacon.  Bacon, Bacon, Bacon!! :)
So let's get started....

I took my potatoes and washed them real well, make sure you don't peel them....that's stays on.

Then I decided to recruit my husband again, I'm pretty good at that; don't ya think?  But he's such a wonderful help how could I resist.  He took the potatoes and used our Mandolin slicer and sliced them up.

While he was working on that I was chopping up the onions and getting those cooked in butter in my iron skillet.

  









I don't think that I've ever used my iron skillet as much as I have in the past few months.  If you don't have one I strongly encourage you to get one.  You can cook anything and everything in it without it sticking, they are amazing skillets.
When the hubby was done with the potatoes I had to get him doing something else so he wouldn't go sit down.  It's not fair :)  And it didn't take alot to convinced him to grate up the cheese.  Any reason to use his food processor.

I used cheddar cheese and Moz. cheese.  They 2 cheeses mixed up together is amazing!
Now it's time to assemble the dish.
Take a 9 x 13 casserole pan and butter it really good.  Then place a layer of potatoes, then a layer of the cheese (make sure to get a little bit of both cheeses), then a 1/3 of the onions & bacon (I cheated and used bacon bits), then your cream mixture.  Oh wait...I don't think I've mentioned that.
All I did was took the half-in-half and the heavy cream and mixed those together in a microwavable dish.  Then warm it up a bit in the microwave.  After removing it from the microwave I added the flour, salt, and pepper to it.  Whisked it together really well and set it aside while preparing everything else.
Now, back to the assembly line. 
Here's a quick picture of what it will look like after you have placed the cream mixture on it.  Make sure that you pour just a 1/3 of the mixture on top.  You will use more later on :)

Continue making more layers until you have done that 3 times.  You will top it off with more cheese and the remaining cream mixture. 
Cover it with foil and bake for about 40 minutes.  Remove the foil when those 40 minutes are up and bake for another 20 minutes.  Make sure your potatoes are done and not crispy when you remove it from the oven.  That's a reminder on my part, not yours. :)
Once you remove it from the oven and it's done it will look like this:



YUM..look how cheesy that looks. 

Here is the recipe if you would like to be bad and eat all that cheese: Scalloped potatoes and "Bacon" Recipe

Now the beans to go with it.  These beans don't have alot to it, but there were wonderful tasting.

I rinsed the beans and made sure that there were no rocks in the bag, then placed that in a big pot.  Chopped up some thick cut bacon and placed that on top of the beans.  Chopped up 1/2 a onion and placed that in there as well.  Filled it up with water:

Let it cook on the stove for about 2 hours.  In the recipe now is when you would add your seasonings: salt, pepper, pinto bean seasonings or...instead of that you could use; cayenne pepper, um...um....chili powder, garlic powder, and oregano.  I knew my brain would eventually work.  Not really, I had to pause and go look at the recipe. 

That's all there is to it.  There's not a final picture cause when I got home they were just getting removed from the burner and out the door I went. Sorry, please don't hold it against me.

Enjoy and have a wonderful day.  I'll be posting another blog here shortly on what I'm cooking today, this one I was playing ketchup...ha ha no catch up. :)