Mashed potatoes * Cream Cheese-Garlic Mashed Potatoes * what “water to cover” means * parboiling

Cream Cheese-Garlic Mashed Potatoes

2 ½ lbs baking potatoes, peeled and quartered

4 oz cream cheese, softened

1 stick salted butter, softened

1 ½ tsp sugar

½ tsp garlic powder

½ tsp salt

1 tsp pepper

about 1/4 c. milk

Boil potatoes until tender. Drain. Preheat oven to 325 Fahrenheit. Add all other ingredients to the potatoes and beat until fluffy. Add the milk last so you can adjust the amount; the milk is just for consistency. The potatoes should be creamy enough that they won’t dry out in the oven.

Grease a 9x9 baking dish and spoon in the potato mixture. Bake for 30 minutes or until heated through.

Welcome to the Real Life Cooking Podcast. I’m Kate Shaw and this week we’re going to learn how to make honest-to-goodness mashed potatoes from scratch. They won’t be lumpy, I promise.

Instant mashed potatoes are pretty good and they’re definitely fast, but homemade mashed potatoes are really easy to make. All you need is a few ingredients and some time. And a pot big enough to hold the potato pieces.

First, you need some potatoes. This is when you want to buy a bag of potatoes. White or yellow-fleshed potatoes are fine, but if you have red potatoes those will work too. Basically any potato will do. You can usually get a three or five pound bag of potatoes for a few dollars, and definitely go for what’s cheap. Don’t buy those individually wrapped potatoes meant for baking. They’re overpriced. Just buy a bag of cheap potatoes.

Bagged potatoes are usually pretty small, but you’re going to chop them up and then mash them anyway so it doesn’t matter. Generally, grab two small to medium potatoes per person to make mashed potatoes. If you ended up with big potatoes, more the size of ones you’d expect to get if you ordered a baked potato in a restaurant, then one per person will do. When I’m making mashed potatoes just for myself, I’ll usually use four small potatoes, since that gives me plenty for leftovers.

You need to peel the potatoes first. You can do this with a paring knife if you don’t have a potato peeler, but really, a potato peeler only costs a buck or so and will literally last you your entire life, so it’s worth buying one. That said, I did go through a phase when I was in my late teens where I wanted to feel rustic, so I peeled potatoes with a knife. It’s not hard, and you can pretend to be a pioneer woman or Cinderella or a captive of pirates who have put you to work in the galley, only the pirate captain is secretly a kind man who falls for your honest beauty and your cooking skills, and eventually you become a pirate too, but you only steal from bad people. Also, the pirate captain is super handsome.

Anyway, peel the potatoes using your method of choice. It’s easiest to peel them over a trash can or bowl so you can just let the peels fall without worrying about clean-up later. If you’re using a knife, you can go ahead and trim off any bruised or rotten places while you work. If you’re using a peeler, you’ll need to trim the potatoes once you’re done and have switched to a knife to cut them up.

Potatoes, of course, are roots of the potato plant that grow underground. That means they’re dirty. Don’t worry that your hand holding the potato gets all grotty and the potato gets covered in muddy handprints. Once you’ve finished peeling, take your naked potatoes to the sink and rinse them and your hands. Then cut the potatoes into pieces. The pieces shouldn’t be too small. You want chunks about the size of, I don’t know, an egg—several inches across, don’t dice them up tiny.

Drop the pieces into your empty pot as you cut them. Once all the potatoes are cut up and in the pot, add enough water to just cover the potatoes.

When