Potatoes, mashed and otherwise

It is very difficult for me to adequately stress the necessity of potatoes.  In my house, though we don’t eat potatoes every day, we could: it is the one starch my children never grow tired of.  Pasta, bread, even rice you can only fix so many ways; potatoes are versatile.  For instance, last night I made a chicken stew for my parents.  My mother is gluten intolerant, so I’m in the habit of making a separate flour-free portion for her.  The recipe called for 3/4 cup of flour to thicken the sauce.  No can do for Mom, so I whisked some leftover mashed potatoes into hot broth instead.  The sauce thickened up nicely, and no one was the wiser.  I’ve been toying with the idea of keeping a box of those powdered potatoes on hand for just such an emergency.  If I do, I’ll let you know how they work as a gluten free sauce/gravy thickener.

Potatoes are good.  When I was younger living in New York City and continually strapped because I kept spending any leftover salary on Joan & David shoes, I used to stop at this little knish shop on the corner of 5th and 13th street.  A hole-in-the-wall was spacious compared to this shop, which was made up of a counter, a guy behind the counter and an oven to warm the knishes his mother had made earlier in a kitchen in Brooklyn.  If you didn’t get there before 6:30pm, they’d be sold out, and there was always a long line of yuppie guys in rumpled suits grabbing a knish to snack on before hitting the bars.  For me, the knish was dinner.  At about $1 a knish it was filling and economical.  I particularly loved the cheddar and spinach combo.  I’d wrap my dinner in several napkins and nibble at it while walking home.  If I didn’t have a buck, 25 cents bought a single potato from the bodega on the corner which I could bake at home and eat with butter, or, if the cupboard was completely bare, with just a bit of salt.  I was never so skinny, and I never again had such beautiful shoes.  I owed it all to my utter love for potatoes.

Potatoes are the ultimate comfort food, are they not?  Particularly when it's been raining for several days and I want something hot and filling.  My convection/toaster oven bakes up a crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside russet or Idaho potato in about 15 min.  A little Irish butter, and I am over the moon.  Last week I had a lot of leftover mashed potatoes because we’d had people over for dinner and I wasn’t sure how much they’d eat.  (My husband is always remarking that I never make quite enough... I’ve been working hard at changing that reputation...and have perhaps gone a bit overboard.)  Of course, I could always warm them up by sticking them on a burner and adding a little more warm milk, but that seemed like the easy way out.   Perhaps because so many of my friends have been planning Passover meals, I found myself thinking of potato pancakes.   Could I make pancakes out of my left over mashed potatoes?  Would they hold together?  

I mixed the potatoes with some shredded cheddar, flattened about 1/2 a cup of this mixture in my hand, dipped them in a whisked egg then dipped them in breadcrumbs.  Then I fried them up in a bit of olive oil until they were golden and crispy.  As Emma would say, OMG!  Friends, I can tell you my little mashed potato pancakes not only held together, but they were unbelievably yummy and satisfying.  Almost as satisfying as that perfect hot knish from my salad days.  Almost.  

Now if I could only find a way to recreate those perfect little Joan &David pink and white spectator pumps...

Basic Mashed Potatoes (feeds family of 4 with leftovers)

4 Russet or Idaho potatoes

1 cup of milk (I use 2% lactose free milk, but you can use anything)

2 tbslp unsalted butter

Kosher salt to taste

white pepper to taste

Wash and peel potatoes.  Cut into chunks that are all about equal in size.  Stick into a large enough pot and cover with water.  Throw a little salt in the water.  Bring to a boil and simmer until you can easily stick a knife or fork into the potatoes.

Meanwhile, warm the milk over low heat.  (** sometimes I stick a smashed garlic clove into the milk, then I discard the clove before I add it to the potatoes.  You can also use the same amount of chicken stock if your family has lactose issues.  Your potatoes won’t be as creamy, but there will be more protein)

When your potatoes are done, mash them up -- I’ve got a nice heavy potato masher from OXO that Maddy loves to use, but a fork, a large spoon, the back of a ladle, anything will work here.  Then add your milk and butter a little at time until your potatoes are as creamy and buttery as you want them.  Salt and pepper to taste.

Mashed Potato Variations

I know people who use 1/2 cup milk and 1/2 cup sour cream -- and people who leave out the butter and add some shredded cheddar.  Very delicious.  Some parsley tossed in is good (my girls hate parsley, but perhaps yours don’t).  Bacon, of course, the perfect addition... Oh, and you can always throw several carrots in the water with the potatoes, or parsnips, or turnips and mash them up with the potatoes and milk. Roast a yam or a sweet potato, scoop out the flesh and toss it in the pot with the boiled potatoes. The possibilities ... Good Lord I’m hungry now!

Crazy Leftover Potato Pancakes

Left over mashed potatoes however much you have

Cheddar cheese, shredded 

1 or 2 eggs

2-3 cups of breadcrumbs

Kosher salt

Olive or Canola oil

Mix the mashed potatoes with the cheddar and form into small not-too-flat(1/4 in?) pancakes.  Crack the egg(s) and whisk ‘em up in a bowl or pie plate.  Dump the breadcrumbs in another pie plate and add a little salt.  Set your oven to warm and pop in a paper towel lined cookie sheet.  Heat the oil in a skillet or saute pan until it is shimmering.  Carefully drop your potato pancakes in and let cook until golden on one side, then turn.  This won’t take more than a few minutes.  Put the cooked pancakes in the warming oven and cook the next batch or batches.  It all depends on how many leftovers you have.

We actually ate these as a vegetarian meal one night -- with some sauteed broccolini and a salad.  Plates were cleaned and no one was hungry until breakfast.

Comfort Food

Emma and I had a rough week last week.  Part of it is middle school.  One minute it's good, the next it's the 9th circle of Hell.  Frankly, you couldn't pay me to go back to middle school.  I wouldn't take a billion dollars delivered by Bruce Springsteen to go back to middle school.  All those complicated relationships, which are complicated further these days by facebook, email, text messaging... according to Emma, you can be friends with someone on facebook, but never speak to them in school.  It gives me angina just thinking about it.  

The issue here, is that it all rolls downhill.  Complicated middle school relationships for Emma translates to crabby relationships with everyone at home.  And who can blame her, really?  She can't say or do what she feels all day long -- it has to come out sometime.  As the oldest of four girls, I remember vividly the brutal pinches, bra snaps, nuggies and snipes I doled out to my sisters.  I'm quite sure they remember them too.

Which brings me to comfort food.   

When I was in middle and high school, the only time I got along with my sister Elizabeth was when we made oatmeal cookies on a Saturday morning.  Usually we'd mix all the ingredients together, and then eat half the batter before it made it into the oven.  The consequent stomach ache was well worth the time spent together.  So I made cookies for Emma:  Chocolate chip oatmeal cookies.  I also made applesauce muffins from a Martha Stewart recipe, which was clearly missing baking powder as an ingredient because they didn't rise.  (The recipe called for baking soda only and had no other leavener other than eggs).  And finally, I made raisin bread.  For me, toasted raisin bread with good butter is the ultimate comfort food.  So throughout the weekend, the girls snuck cookies and I surreptitiously toasted slices of bread.  By Monday everything was gone.  

Time to make more.

Here is the recipe for cookies.  The muffins I have to experiment with again and I'm going to create a separate post for the bread:

Chocolate Chip Oatmeal Cookies:

(adapted from The Cook's Bible, Kimball, Christopher, 1996)

2 sticks softened unsalted butter (*see tips below)

1 cup brown sugar (light or dark, what ever you have)

3/4 cup granulated sugar

2 eggs - room temperature (* see tips below)

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

1 1/2 tsp Kosher salt (or 1/4 tsp table salt - Kosher is better)

1 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp nutmeg - OR 1/4 tsp cinnamon (don't use both,it's too much - but some kids don't like the taste of nutmeg)

3 cups rolled oats

1/12 cups milk or dark chocolate chips depending on preference

1. Heat oven to 350.
   
2. In bowl of electric mixer beat butter until creamy then add sugars and beat until fluffy.  Beat eggs in one at a time.
   
3. Sift flour, salt and baking powder and cinnamon or nutmeg together. 
   
4. Add to butter mixture using a spoon or rubber spatula.  Stir in oats and chips.  
   
5. Scoop a heaping tablespoon of batter onto parchment lined cookie sheet  (Parchment just makes life easier, but if you don't have it just plonk the cookies onto a cookie sheet, no need to grease it)  Now, I like to get all my cookies plonked onto sheets of parchment, instead of just letting it all hang out in the bowl while the first batch bakes.  This seems to cut down on the amount of fingers swiping chocolate chips from the bowl.  Since I only have 3 cookie sheets, I reserve one cookie sheet for the parchment, and make layers -- batch of cookie dough, new parchment on top, batch of cookie dough new parchment etc.  
   
6. Bake each batch for 15 - or so minutes -- until the bottoms turn brown.  Then slide the parchment with the cookies on it off onto a cooling rack (if you don't have one of these use the rack of the broiler pan that came with your oven, and if you don't have parchment, let your cookies rest on cookie sheet 2 min or so before spatulaing them onto the rack.  I just made up a new verb: spatulaing) and let them cool.
   
7. Rinse your cookie sheet to cool it down before you slide the next parchment of cookie dough onto it.  If you don't your chocolate will start to melt too soon, and your cookies could burn and stick.
   
8. If you can manage it, let your cookies cool 15 minutes or so before digging in.  I can never manage it, and always have burnt fingers and tongue after making cookies.

**Tips**:

You really should use unsalted butter because otherwise your salt ratio in the recipe will be all messed up.  That said, I never remember my mom having unsalted butter in the fridge when my sister and I made cookies, and I never remember my cookies being too salty. Then again, I have a high tolerance for salt. Buy some unsalted butter and leave it in the freezer.  The softening tip below works as well with frozen butter -- it just might take a wee bit longer.

I can never seem to remember to take the butter and eggs out early enough for them to get soft, but I've found that if you cut the butter into teeny tiny pieces and spread them out on a large plate, by the time you've gathered together all the other ingredients and the bowls, and found the beater attachment for the mixer, and looked in the basement for another tube of parchment, and slapped your children's hands away from the chips, your butter will be just the right softness.

Eggs can easily be brought to room temperature by sticking the whole egg into a bowl of warm water for a minute.  Or you can crack the eggs into a bowl right after cutting up the butter, but before gathering, looking, arguing.  They'll warm up to room temp this way too.