More Than Lumpy..i.e., I Told You Amy.......

In all the craziness of the holiday season I have forgotten to share a "funny" story about Thanksgiving. I will preface this story by saying I am a fairly decent cook...seriously. I really enjoy cooking and I'm pretty good @ most things I whip up. Some of you can vouch for me...By my "arch-nemesis" (as Jay calls this dish) is mashed potatoes. They kick my butt EVERYTIME...I think I made them really good ONCE...I don't know what it is. This is a fairly simple dish to most people. But I have screwed up mashed potatoes in every way possible. I've made mushy mashed potatoes, lumpy mashed potatoes, relatively flavorless mashed potatoes and the piece de resistance and the type that were made on Thanksgiving day: hard-as-brick-that-they almost-broke-my-Kitchen Aid-mixer-mashed-potatoes....Those of you who have prepared a Thanksgiving dinner know that things can get pretty hairy in that last hour of preparation. Everything seems to come together at once. Your attention gets diverted on pulling the turkey out, letting it rest for a bit, then the carving....throwing your casseroles into the oven, getting your rolls on the pan to immediately follow...worrying about how everything that needs to be hot will stay hot and all the cold stuff will stay cold....Hectic is an understatement when it comes to getting Thanksgiving dinner onto the table. Especially if you're working alone, as I was.....Excuses, excuses...I know....

So in the craziness that is the "final hour" I neglected to look @ the clock when I turned my potatoes on to cook. I had a brief moment in my dinner preparation when the turkey was resting, the casseroles were heating up, and I had nothing to do. I glanced over @ my pot of potatoes boiling away on the stove. I panicked...they had certainly been on the stove too long. I poked a fork into one (apparently the ONLY cooked one) and it was soft. I yanked the pot off the stove, drained the potatoes and tossed them into my mixer. Added a little milk, butter, and switched that bad boy on. At that moment, my parents arrived...The kids start jumping up and down, the dog is barking...I'm not even noticing that my mixer is literally lifting itself off the counter in an attempt to mash these bricks...I mean, potatoes.....It quiets down and I glance over @ the mixer which has caught my attention because it is about to fall off my counter....I notice the potatoes are a "bit" hard. Any normal person would take those potatoes out of the mixer and toss them back into the pot to continue cooking, right? What do I do? I add more milk...that's right...I add more milk...Certainly enough milk will create a consistency that one may be able to describe as mashed....right? OK...WRONG....My poor mixer was able to scrape some cooked parts away from the mostly RAW potatoes...I had a gluey mess...Time for confession. I threw everything else on the table, but a smile on my face, walked into my living room and told my family that we would not be having mashed potatoes with our Thanksgiving meal....chirp, chirp, chirp...My Dad asked what happened and I told him they were not Thanksgiving worthy (or ANY meal-worthy)...He told me he liked lumpy mashed potatoes (was that passive aggressive???). But I knew there was no way that I was putting those things on my table...And so that's the story of our mashed potato-less Thanksgiving...I think I may have started a new family tradition.....Happy holidays, ya'll.....



before.......and after...................