This morning my wife and I woke up and dove straight into the kitchen for our morning routine. My wife usually prepares a meal for our lunchboxes, while I took the responsibility of preparing a simple breakfast and our morning drinks, usually 2 Tang’s Vanilla Tea, or ginger tea (if you haven’t already tried any of these, you should give them a shot).
Due to limited time and a not-so-hungry state at 5 a.m, I usually prepare a simple breakfast, such as toast with jam, corned beef or tuna sandwich, of when we feel like a cold breakfast, we’d just have a bowl of corn flakes with milk. However, this morning I felt like putting a little more effort on our breakfast. So Instead I made this:
Mashed potato!!! This is definitely one of my favorite dish, and very close to my heart.
They say that a good mashed potato dish, depends on 4 factors. Here they are and my techniques of cooking:
1. What kind of potato are you using?
To be honest, I’m not a potato expert, and hence I do not have any particular potato that I like. I do however make sure that the potatoes I bought are free from spots or holes.
2. How do you cook them?
There are two ways you can serve your mashed potato, which is “with” or “without” the potato skin. This is a matter of taste and preference. Before boiling, I cut the potatoes into pieces. This is just so that its faster to cook, and easier to mash. Usually I cut 1 potato into 3-4 pieces.
After that, I boil the potato, the length varies depending on your flame, but I usually make sure that they are done, by stabbing it with a fork. A cooked potato is usually easy to stab, and then when you try to pick it up, it slowly slides down and comes off the fork.
Later on, I let the potatoes to cool off a little, and peel the potato skins.
Sometimes, while boiling I also add ingredients such as salt and onions.
3. How do you mash them?
So now you have a bowl of boiled cut potatoes, some with and without skins. Now what we need to do is mash them. There are 2 important components in this process; the first is additional ingredients which is milk and butter. This comes back again to taste, you don’t want to put too much milk, because it would make potatoes too soft and look like baby porridge. So make sure to add little by little while mashing it. 3 spoonful of butter is usually enough, but i love butter so I usually put 5-7 spoons :P
The second important component is your mashing tool. Here are a wide variety of potato mashers that you can use.
4. What do you add to them?
Salt, pepper, oregano (if available). If you have some smoked chicken/beef in the fridge, you can slice them up to tiny little square pieces, and while mashing the potato, you can add and mix them up.
I usually have my mashed potatoes with Del Monte’s Sweet Chilli Sauce. You can eat actually at any time of the day for steak or other main courses. Mashed potatoes are common in UK to be consumed side by side with sausages, known as “Bangers and Mash”, or with eggs. Mexicans eat them with eggs and baked beans (frijoles).
This morning, we had mashed potato with some chicken nuggets, and ate them with Del Monte’s Sweet Chilli Sauce.
Yummy yummy…
