About two weeks ago, David asked what I would be willing to cook for him to take to his Thanksgiving dinner at work. I listed 4 or 5 choices and he picked mashed potatoes. He rarely comments on my cooking, good or bad, so I was pleased to know he enjoys my homemade mashed potatoes enough to share with his coworkers. My joy over the potato-making was short lived.

All you cooks out there can shake your head in dismay, but I thought all potatoes were created equal. Now of course I know the difference in a red potato, white potato and sweet potato but as far as which white potatoes boil up best to be mashed, I knew no difference. I bought the cheapest potatoes I could find yesterday....and the mashed potatoes turned out terrible! No matter what I did, the potatoes were too firm. The flavor was okay but the texture was all wrong so I finally (after much effort) gave up on batch #1 and made a run to the grocery store for better potatoes. The unused batch is going to the freezer, I may attempt to doctor them up into a cream of potato soup in the near future. The new batch turned out fine, but at what cost? Between the two batches, I have dirtied every dish and spoon in my kitchen. While boiling batch #2, something that spilled on the burner a couple days ago caught fire and set off my smoke alarms, upsetting the dog. Now my house is filled with smokey, smelly haze, I have a mountain of potato smeared dishes to clean and I have to deliver the potatoes to David's work since they first batch wasn't decent enough for him to take this morning.

All this and house guests headed this way later today! I really don't have time to be blogging, but I had to have an outlet before I exploded. Now I can go on with my day.