German recipe (made with leftover mashed potatoes)

by Rose Marie Seifried
(St. Charles, IL, USA)

Hi. My name is Rose Marie. When I was a little girl, my grandmother, (who was born somewhere in Bavaria and immigrated to the US in 1894), used to make a side dish or a warm snack using leftover mashed potatoes that she fried in a skillet. She would break the mashed potatoes into small pieces in the frying pan and they would turn out to be irregular-shaped and light golden brown. She would put them on a plate for my cousin and me and we would eat them, picking up a spoonful at a time and sipping cold milk from a glass. My cousin and I are old ladies now, but we would love to taste those little things made from mashed potatoes fried in a skillet! They were delicious spoonfuls, alternated with sips of cold milk. The problem is, we do not know what she added to the mashed potatoes in the frying pan. Neither my cousin or I speak German, but we both remember our grandmother calling them something that, in American, sounded like "stair-its" or stare-ets." Please, can anyone help? Thank you so much, if you can.