mashed potatoes & turnips

dealing with an overflow of vegetables from the farm share (in a good way!), sarah emily and I endeavored to make a dent in the situation last night. My favorite thing pretty much ever is mashed potatoes, so I went down that route, and attempted to deal with the turnips as well, even though I am not such an experienced turnip-person. sarah emily was more adventurous and made a yummy roasted root vegetables with apple situation *and* a cabbage, kale 'n' beans extravaganza (flax seeds and sesame oil!) Hopefully she'll post soon and you'll get the low down on all that. in the meantime, I will work with the pictures that I have...

I consulted, of course, America's Test Kitchen since they are basically my food bible. Apparently half and half and boiling your potatoes unpeeled and adding butter *before* other dairy is very important. Who knew?

ATK calls for 1lb potatoes and 1lb other root vegetables. I just used all the yellow turnips and all the potatoes we had - it was half and halfish. Another thing I learned - yellow turnips are white. white turnips are purple! (and apparently white turnips - which are purple - are not that great in mashed situations, so that's why I just used yellow even though we had some pretty white/purple ones too.)

I peeled the turnips and quartered them. I rinsed the potatoes. I put the potatoes in a large pot of boiling water and let them cook for 15 minutes - then I added the quartered turnips and boiled it all for another 15 minutes. - next time I would boil the turnips a little longer - maybe add them in at the 10 minute mark and then cook with the potatoes for 20 minutes?

I turned the heat off and scooped all the turnips out with a slotted spoon into a bowl. then I scooped out the potatoes into a different bowl, dumped the water, and had sarah emily get the grit out of the pot while I started the long process of peeling the hot potatoes. Yeah. No kidding.

you stab it with a dinner fork, hold it in the air, and then use a paring knife to scrape/peel off the skin. this took awhile, but ATK assured me that it would taste *much* better because of this step

.

peeled potatoes and turnips went into the still-warm pot (should have been hot - but beggars can't be choosers!) Sarah emily melted a stick of butter for me, and once I had mashed the veggies pretty well with my potato masher, I mashed the butter in. Then sarah emily warmed up 1/2 cup of half and half, and I tossed that into the pot too, mashing some more. (apparently the fat in the butter coats the starch and keeps it from getting watery with the half and half? there is some chemistry here I am not entirely clear on.)

voila! a *touch* of salt, and they were done! We served with sarah emily's dishes and some gourmet butter - a present from chloe!

this picture is kind of blurry - but use your imagination!