What’s Your Mashed Potato Personality?

Hey, I'm Louisa Shafia, here on eHow.com and today we're talking mashed potatoes. Today, I'm showing you how to make several different kinds of mashed potatoes, throughout the Winter or for whenever you want this classic comfort food. So I'm going to start out by showing you traditional mashed potatoes. So here are some potatoes that I boiled in water with a little bit of salt and I'm going to mash these with some butter and this butter is pretty much at room temp so it's going to mash really easily into these potatoes. I'm going to add a little bit of salt and here we go. So I'm just using a hand held masher, one thing with potatoes is that you don't want to put them in the food processor because they will turn into a lumpy liquidy mess. You have to do them by hand. So you want to make sure when you go to mash your potatoes that they are cooked all the way through, that they're really nice and fork tender. Now I'm going to add a little bit of milk. You can use cream. You could use soy milk or almond milk, whatever you want in here but this is just going to give it a little bit more of a creamy texture to my potatoes and you would start with a small amount of the liquid. You don't want to put in too much at once and then just eyeball it, make sure it looks good, just enough liquid to make it creamy. So these look really great, classic mashed potatoes. Now for my first variation, I am going to add some spicy tangy horseradish to these. So I'm going to add a couple of big spoonfuls and if you've ever had horseradish, it's one of those classic accompaniments. You use it in cocktail sauce, you use it with potato latkes, you mix it with sour cream. It's really versatile and it's just going to make these a little bit spicy. Okay, so these are my horseradish mashed potatoes with just a little bit of salt. Okay, for my next version, I'm so excited about this. I'm going to make garlic mashed potatoes. So here is some garlic that I roasted off, this is what it looks like. I just rubbed it in olive oil and roasted it in the oven until it was tender. I squeezed out the garlic and I got this delicious rich paste. This is what it looks like. So I'm putting this into my mashed potatoes and you know what, you don't even have to use butter if you don't want to. In this version I'm going to add a little bit of olive oil and I'm just going to mix in this mellow roasted garlic paste. So I'm just going to get the full flavor of the garlic but mellowed without any of that sting from raw garlic, just mix it in until it's fully immersed in the potatoes can't even see it, and this is what it looks like. This is a really nice kind of sophisticated accompaniment to fish, chicken, any kind of protein, really nice and subtle. Okay, this is really cool. This is a traditional Irish dish that's called Colcannon and it's made with mashed potatoes and sauteed kale. You could also use sauteed green cabbage. I love kale so I made some organic kale. I just sauteed it in a little bit of olive oil and salt. I cut it into shreds and I'm just folding it into the mashed potatoes. I love this idea because it's a great way to get your healthy leafy greens right along with your classic comfort food, mashed potatoes so Colcannon is a great way to go and it looks really beautiful. I love this for a holiday table. Okay, same idea, these are cremini mushrooms that I sauteed in some oil and I minced them up really fine and I'm going to stir these into my mashed potatoes. Now you might have heard of truffle mashed potatoes. This is kind of the same idea but instead of using truffle oil I'm using actual whole mushrooms that I cooked and cut up. Now you could use any kind of mushroom that you like for this. You could use portobellos, you could use button mushrooms, you could use a more expensive wild kind of mushroom like chanterelles or porcinis and this looks wonderful. This is so warming in the cold weather. In the Fall, it's a really nice addition to a holiday table. It looks great. Okay, and here is my last version of mashed potatoes, but wait, it's not mashed potatoes, it's mashed root vegetables. So, maybe you'll notice this is a little bit of a deeper yellow color and that's from these gold beets that I mixed in so this is a combination of gold beets, celery root, turnips and parsnips and this tastes delicious. I made it with some butter. I made it just the way that I made my mashed potatoes and if you want to, with these you don't have to hand mash them, you can put root vegetables other than potatoes into the food processor and they will come out with a beautiful smooth puree like this one and it's a great way to incorporate healthy root vegetables into a meal. So that's it. I hope you learned a lot from this expose on mashed potatoes. I'll see you next time here on eHow.com.