My partner and I got a bit carried away yesterday. We are accustomed to cooking side dishes for large, family get-togethers and so our batch sizes were… excessive.
There are a lot of fancy mashed potato recipes out there, but I avoid them all. You only need 5 things for the perfect mashed potatoes: russet potatos, salt, milk, butter and a Kitchenaid Stand Mixer (with paddle and whisk attachments).
Potato Details
This year I used our electric pressure cooker (like an Instant Pot, but an off-brand) to boil the potatoes. I’m not sure exactly how much time it saved (some, just not sure how much) but it did free up our large pot for other dishes in the meantime. Potatoes went into the pressure cooker peeled and cut into ~6cm cubes. Afterwards, into the Kitchenaid with some heavy pinches of salt and about half a cup of salted butter and mixed with the paddle attachment for about 45 seconds on medium-low speed.
Then switch to the whisk attachment, add in about 60ml of milk and whisk to fluff for about 30 seconds on high speed. Then transfer to a dish. We add butter on top to keep it from drying out while waiting for everything else to get ready to serve)
A traditional dish that my family prepares for Christmas and Thanksgiving is candied yams, which seems divisive even among other Americans; I definitely have a sweet tooth and candied yams have been, literally, my favorite food for most of my life.
Candied Yams
I boiled the sweet potatoes whole in their skin (my grocery stores do differentiate between “yams” and “sweet potatoes” and we buy sweet potatoes, but I still call the dish “candied yams”), then a cooled them in water before pulling the skins off (after boiling and then cooling, the skins will just fall off with a bit of coaxing) and then I trimmed off the stringier bits of the potatoes with a knife and cut into chunks. First, it is topped with pats of butter and sprinkled with brown sugar.
And then the whole thing is buried under a layer of marshmallows and put in the oven; this time I tried it at 350F (175C) which worked well; this is also the first time I’ve ever used a gas oven to make them and I will be sad if I ever have to use electric again in the future because I managed to get a great crisp on the marshmallows after about 25 minutes in the oven.
We also prepared some fresh green beans
First by boiling until they had a good texture, and then drained and set aside while I melted some butter and sautéed garlic until lightly golden brown, and then I added the green beans back in and cooked until they just started crisping.
My partner and I had started a (5lb!) beef roast earlier in the morning atop a bed of onion, carrots, celery, and about 2 cups of beef bone broth
Beef Roast
And then I concluded the preparations by putting my rolls in the 400F (204C) oven until browned (we brushed more butter on them which gave them an even flakier texture). And I used about 3 cups (700ml) of the roast drippings to make a gravy (which is in the creamer in this following picture because we don’t have a gravy boat); beginning with a roux (which I almost lost due to being new to heat management on a gas range) and then integrating the drippings and bringing to a gentle boil to reduce
Also pictured: my partner made Brandy Old Fashioned cocktails for us while we were cooking (and then another round for when we were dining). Brandy Old Fashioned cocktails are a tradition in Wisconsin where my in-laws are from. These are not quite traditionally prepared as they use Sprite instead of a sugar cube and soda water.
P.S. Somehow I ate everything on my plate and then ate a small slice of each of the pies (with homemade whipped cream for the pumpkin pie)
You can see the corner of my partner’s laptop – we tuned into our local news channel’s broadcast of the traditional lighting of the Plaza Lights, which was the first time I got a good look at our next door neighbor who is a morning news anchor for a news channel here… but I don’t watch televised news (and if I did, I wouldn’t that early in the morning, and if I did, it wouldn’t be that network/station)
