Recipe: Roasted Garlic Mashed Potatoes

[ellyssian]

• 5 pounds of russet potatoes
• 3/4 cup butter, softened
• 8 oz Philadelphia original cream cheese, softened
• 1/2 cup Half & Half
• Roasted Garlic, to taste
• fresh ground pepper
• sea salt

Soften 1.5 sticks of butter ~ pull out from fridge 1 hour before cooking, and place on a metal pan to act as a heat sink!

Soften cream cheese ~ pull out from fridge 1 hour before cooking, and... yeah it's the same. You can probably guess it. Anywho, looks like this, except maybe less fuzzy, unless you had too much to drink, haven't cleaned your glasses, don't have your contacts in, are crying, or splashed something in your eye:



Peel potatoes. We brought in a professional for this task, and Rachel took her peeler to them (kid would do terrible in the Army ~ likes to peel potatoes? whatever would they do?):



Rinse potatoes under cold water ~ and yes, I did take far more photos of these opening steps before giving up on photography and focusing on cooking right when the visual elements might actually prove useful:



Chop potatoes in half, or to some other decent, regular size (they cook better if they're all pretty much the same mass):



Bring a pot of water to a simmer and add potatoes. Yep, that's right: I am out of photos, at least until we get to the plated meal.

Bring to boil and cook for 30 minutes.

When cooked, a fork will slide into the potatoes with no resistance.

Drain the potatoes and return to the pot and put back on the stove.

Turn the burner to low.

Use a potato masher ~ not a mixer ~ to mash the potatoes until most of the steam has escaped, about 3-4 minutes... and I just discovered I lied ~ I did take more photos, I just tagged them wrong and missed them when I gathered them up for the post:



Turn off burner.

Slice softened butter into potatoes.

Add cream cheese.

Add Half & Half.

Mash again.

Add pepper and salt to taste.

Add roasted garlic to taste, I used 6 bulbs. They were large, and it probably could have used a few less. Good, though. =)

Mix potatoes and serve with a few more cloves on top of each serving.





As with the roasted garlic recipe, blame credit where credit is due: check out my source for this, Pioneer Woman. She takes photos of all the steps I didn't, so there's more to look at.

By the way, ironically enough, I stumbled across Ree's site while looking for a recipe for onion straws, so I might come one step closer to actually making my Fisherman's Salad ~ a concept meal I came up with when I started drawing up refined plans for my restaurant five or ten years ago... see, I told you I have waves of interest ~ and after checking out her recipe, I strolled through some of her others and came across this double whammy. Prior to that, I wasn't sure how I was going to prepare the potatoes for the Valentine's Feast... thanks again, Ree! =)