Tuesday, 19 June 2012

Number Nineteen: Mashed Potato

Hello again!!

Apologies, it has been quite a while since I last posted! But I have a valid excuse - I've been a busy bee revising for my A levels, and as much as I'd like to spend all day procrastinating by baking cupcakes and the like, I felt I should get my head down and do some work.

And it has paid off! (I hope)

All the exams that matter are done now. YAY!! There is the small matter of a general studies exam on monday, but considering almost no university considers that anyway, I feel it isn't worth worrying about.

Now, onto the recipe. I DID manage to find time between revision sessions to cook my dad a father's day dinner on sunday. One of his favourite meals is sausage and mash, so I used Nigella's recipe for mash from Nigella Bites, and some delicious sausages we bought the day before from the Good Food Show (yes, somehow I also managed to find the time to tear myself away from revision and enjoy a day of free samples, cooking demonstrations and shopping. Funny that.) For dessert we had Creme Brulee, which I will post next.

The quantities below are enough for one person, so increase for however many people you need to feed.
Nigella suggests investing in a potato ricer (which I did), as the mash comes out a lot smoother, and you don't need to peel the potatoes. The ricer works really well! But I still think you should peel the potatoes as they got caught in my ricer so I had to keep picking them out which was a bit annoying.


Ingredients

250-350g potatoes, such as Maris Piper or Kind Edward
approx 75g warm milk or cream
approx 50g unsalted butter
salt and pepper
freshly grated nutmeg


Method

1. Slice the potatoes into same-sized chunks.




2. Boil in a large pan of lightly salted water, until soft enough to mash. I usually stab them with a knife - if it slides in easily like butter then they're ready.




3. Drain the potatoes thoroughly. Now you need to rice to potatoes, so swap to a smaller saucepan if you want - it makes it easier to mix in the milk/cream and butter later.




4. Rice your taters!! They come out looking like grated cheese. It's pretty cool.




5. With a wooden spoon, beat in the warm milk or cream (add this slowly as you don't want to add too much and have runny mash!), the butter and the seasonings. Beat quite well - you want to get lots of air into it.




6. Now serve! We had the sausages and mash with peas and gravy. Yum yum! My dad was really happy which means I was happy with it too:)


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