| Mashed potatoes. Can they get any better? Yes! You no longer have to eat your potatoes in monochrome! Allow me introduce: mashed potatoes in two colours!
"But, Footprints," you ask, "why not just call it Mashed potatoes in two colours?" Well, here is where my villainous chef supreme criminal mind comes in. Imagine if you will, a posh dinner you are organizing. The dinner guests are all expecting a dinner that equals the previous one. Her Royal Highness The Queen takes her seat, and you say, "Your Majesty, today I have prepared Duck a l'orange and mashed potatoes in two colours."
Um.
So here we have it: Mashed potatoes aux deux couleurs - a dish fit for a king (or queen, if you will). It is extremely yummy, and it looks much better than the somewhat plebeian mashed potatoes, so it deserves a name more fitting. And nothing like French can make a dish sound unnecessarily posh. It can be a side dish or as an accompaniment to a meal. I have even been known to eat it as a main course, but only because I burned my kebabs. Anyway:
Ingredients
Serves 4
Preparation
Peel the potatoes, cut them up into squares, and put them in a pot of water. Cook them until they are easily penetrated by a fork. (Basically - make them how you usually make mashed potatoes. There's no real difference.) Mash them together with the cream, milk, garlic, salt and pepper. You may want to vary the amount of cream and milk. I don't use butter as I get enough fat from the cream, and it gives the dish such a creamy flavor. If you want, you can add some of the water they were cooked in. It's not necessary, though - the milk (and the cream) add the necessary moisture. Don't be stingy on the salt and the pepper. Unless you are a seasoned mashed potato maker, you will probably need to add more than you first think.
That's basically it - pretty regular mashed potatoes, but it tastes incroyable. Anyway - now for the fun part. If you want - you can mash them all up together, and get a pretty smooth colour. But that's no fun, is it? So you mash them up separately (use half the amounts of cream and milk on each part). And now you have two separate mashed potatoes. (Different colours!) Make sure they are nice and smooth. Now you can simply place them side by side to get a nice two colour effect. Just shove an asparagus on top (or not), and it can be served in any posh restaurant. You will be surprised at how good it looks, and how unlike the regular mashed potatoes. And it doesn't even take more effort than regular mashed potatoes!
But there are more exciting options. You can ripple your potatoes - thin strips of each. Your kids will devour the Mashed potatoes with pictures of dinosaurs on them™ like there is no tomorrow!
Or it can make a wonderful addition to a romantic dinner. Wine, Barry White in the background, and a picture of a sunset or a rose on her mashed potatoes are a guaranteed success.
Or you can draw pictures of members of parliament and eat them!
The possibilities are endless!
sneff says: "There is a variety of potatoes called "Purple congo" that has purple flesh - and the colour doesn't fade after you cook them. I used to make mash from them - the colour is fairly freaky".
So we have, instead of just 2 colours, 3! to choose from. That gives us yellow-orange, yellow-purple or orange-purple mashed potatoes aux deux couleurs, or even (dare you make this?) the fantastic trichromatic Yellow-Orange-Purple Mashed potatoes aux trois couleurs!
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