Okay--I thought that after 20 years of being out on my own, I knew how to cook food!! Sunday we had a big family dinner to celebrate my husband's uncle's 80th birthday. So we were asked to bring baked potatoes for 30 people. Knowing that Sunday was Ward Conference, I decided to get prepared on Saturday (you know... Saturday is a special day, it's the day we get ready for Sunday!)
So I scrubbed 30 potatoes and decided to bake them in my big roaster pan. I've never baked potatoes in it before (just turkey), but read that it would take about 1 hour to bake. So before I stacked the tators in the pan on Saturday night, I decided to poke them with a knife (one less thing to do on Sunday) and then I staked those tators.
When we started eating, I thought the I had bought a rotten bag of potatoes--all of them had brown marks in them. It was only after the dinner (thanks to everyone for not commenting on the discoloration) that I figured out that the marks were from the oxygen getting in the holes that I had poke the night before!
This is what they looked like when I peeled the leftover ones. I cooked a few extra so we could have potato casserole on Monday.
My lesson I learned: while it is great to prepare some things before hand, don't poke the potatoes until you are ready to bake them!!!
Needless to say, the potato casserole was still delicious, so it wasn't a total failure! And our uncle had a wonderful day & meal.