Potato Week: Mashed Potatoes (and Friends)

You get used to all kinds of strange things living in a co-op (spoons appearing in your mailbox; a challah costume on the dining room table), so Liz didn't ask a lot of questions when she came upon us in the kitchen at 10:30 p.m., up to our elbows in potato peelings.

I hesitate to confess, but I only wanted to make mashed potatoes because most of the appealing potato recipes I found online called for leftover mashed potatoes.

We were on a roll after peeling all the potatoes, so we peeled our parsnips and celeriac and put them in the pot, too. (I'm calling it "mashed potatoes" this time, but this is really about the same thing as the various celeriac purees we talked about before, just with a higher potatoes: other white things ratio.)

I was going to add what I thought was a turnip, too, but it started bleeding when I peeled it: apparently a white beet? Abort!

We boiled all the veggies in our biggest pot (not big enough!) and mashed them with butter and milk, salt and pepper.

We garnished half with copious parsley and a pat of butter and took it to a potluck; the rest went into the refrigerator to be repurposed. Stay tuned ...