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My sweet friend Jessica and I hung out this week to make dinner.  We met in home group through church and decided we’d like deepen our friendship and share our life experiences, so we’ve been meeting weekly.  Recently we’ve embarked upon what I’m humbly dubbing, “Bianca’s Cooking School for the Remedial Cook.”  Jessica’s sort of a self-proclaimed remedial cook, but not for long!

This week’s menu included cheddar-stuffed burgers, boston lettuce & cucumber salad and mashed sweet potatoes.  Both the burgers and salad recipes were courtesy of the Martha-Master, but the sweet potatoes were sort of an adaptation of a recipe I saw online and Jessica’s ingenious spontaneous mind.

We began as you would for making any type of mashed potatoes.

Once they were done boiling (tender to the poke of a knife/fork) I let them cool and then peeled and cut them into large chunks.  The next traditional step would be to use a masher.

But we didn’t have a masher.

So we thought we’d chop them in a food processor to make them mashed. Except when we plugged in the food processor it didn’t turn on.

So we switched plugs.

Still nothing.

What now? We tried putting them in the blender.

Except the blade was no where to be found.

So we got out a hand mixer/masher.

But the potato chunks were too big and it wasn’t working.

It was like using a weed eater to mow a farm.

Were we on candid camera?

Where’s the camera?

What now?

Jessica got an idea! “Why don’t we try putting them in Ziploc bags and then mash them that way?”

I looked for Ziploc bags and there were 3 left. Hooray!  We loaded the potato chunks into the bags (carefully leaving the bag slightly open on one corner so as to protect ourselves from bursting bags!) and then we got started.

In the middle of mashing we scooped the potatoes out of the bag, put them in a bowl and microwaved them for a bit to soften them more (apparently one potato didn’t completely boil because it was still hard to mash).

Once we mashed them as much as we could, we scooped them into a bowl and added butter (about 2 teaspoons) and a sprinkle of cinnamon to taste.  In the end they were more like chunky mashed sweet potatoes, but texture didn’t matter to us because they tasted great and our homemade victory tasted even better!

*Note: We were cooking in a friend’s kitchen. Obviously a friend who has a broken food processor and an incomplete blender.

*Additional Note: The burgers and salad went off without a hitch and tasted amazing too!

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010, 2:00 am   |   experiences with food, food  |  RSS feed Pinging is disabled. But you can skip to the end and leave a response.