Re: Mashed potatoes
Here is the easiest and most basic way. At the end, I will put some other options for achieving fancier mashed potatohood.
Get some potatoes. Cut them up into pieces no bigger than an inch-inch and a half square. Put some water in a pot, and a spoonful or two of salt. Put in the potatoes, let them come to a boil. Turn the fire down, but just a little bit. Let the potatoes cook for 15 minutes or so. Then stick a fork in one of the biggest pieces. If the fork goes in easily, you can take them off the fire.
If you're not sure whether the fork is going in easily or not, take out a big piece, run it under cold water so you don't burn yourself, and taste it. If you can bite it, and it tastes like a cooked potato, that means it is one, and you can take its companions off the fire.
Dump the potatoes into a colander and let the water drain off. Now dump them back into the cooking pot and put them back on the fire, but this time turn it way down. All you want to do now is cook away the excess water so that your finished product is fluffier.
This won't take but a minute or two, and you should shake the pan around a bit so that nothing scorches.
Now you are ready to mash! If you have a potato masher, you can of course use that, but it is not necessary, you can just use a fork to mash them up. Alternately mash and stir with the fork until there are no more really big chunks. Don't worry about smaller chunks.
Now you are ready to put stuff in. You have several options here. The most traditional, and old fashioned choices will be butter and heavy cream. Do the butter first, so that the heat from the potatoes will melt it. You can take them off the fire now. Put in a piece of butter not quite the size of an egg. You can cut that into several pieces if you want, stir around until the butter melts.
Now add salt and pepper. This you will have to just add a bit and taste. You may want to use ground white pepper if you don't want to see black specks. If you do want to see black specks, used ground black pepper.
When you have the salt and pepper like you want it, add a bit of heavy cream. Start out with just a little bit, beat the potatoes with a fork. If they still feel too thick, add a little more cream. Do this until they are the consistency you want. Then taste again to see if you need a little more salt.
That's it! You have committed mashed potatoes!
Now here are some other options:
If you want to make Martha Stewart mashed potatoes, peel them before you cook them**, and mix in butter and cream using some sort of electronic equipment so that the resulting product is very white and very smooth.
If you want modern nouvelle heart-healthy potatoes, use I Can't Believe It Costs More Than Butter or one of those light low fat no fat margarine products instead of butter, and some kind of blue milk, 1% or 2% or something instead of heavy cream.
You can also use sour cream or yogurt instead of heavy cream. Just about any old white dairy products will do, really. Feel free to mix and match.
If you want to add even more stuff, you can mix in garlic powder, or chopped, sauteed garlic, just about any yellow cheese, like cheddar or cheshire or even muenster or gouda. You can add raw chopped green onions, chives, bacon bits, or all of that stuff.
Or you can serve the potatoes plain, and surround them with little dishes containing chives, bacon bits, shredded or grated cheeses, and let people Design their Own according to taste. I would also make sure that the table contains either butter or margarine, or both, as invariably no matter how much you put in there, somebody will want more. Some people just like to add the butter to watch it melt on the potatoes on their plates!
**The skins contain vitamins and flavor. Martha wouldn't care about those things, but you might.
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