The fourth of the 4 dishes I made before I left for my trip a few weeks ago is from Book 1, Group 1 (Appetizers & Starters), Subgroup 4 (Potatoes & Vegetables), Card #23: Mashed Potatoes with Broccoli. I made this dish to accompany 6-4: Easy Stuffed Chicken Breasts and to use up some CSA veggies.
They ended up being kind of…boring. I realize neither mashed potatoes nor broccoli are EXCITING things, but this dish needed a lot of help.
This one’s a bit stained–I’ve made it before. I don’t remember exactly when, but it was for some dinner long ago. I must have neglected to make a notation–that’s how boring it was then too.
Potatoes were from the CSA box–German Butterball potatoes. Subbed half-and-half for whipping cream, as usual. I had run out of homemade stock at this point, and so I resorted to using up the last of a jar of chicken base I found in the fridge door as a replacement for veggie stock. Obviously, don’t use chicken stock if you’re trying to keep it vegetarian.
Cut up potatoes–you can see they’re a bit yellow on the inside (even without my post processing).
My sous chef (husband) chopping up the broccoli for me.
I worked on the green onions.
I already had the VitaMix out for 3-13: Velvety Carrot Soup, so I (lazily) decided to just mash up the potatoes and broccoli using that. Lack of a dishwasher leads to bad decisions in the name of washing one less dish, sometimes.
It turned the bottom to liquid and the top stayed pretty chunky.
Sigh.
Before doing any more damage and really being upset with the results, I stopped as soon as I realized this was not going to work.
Keepin’ it old school. Sometimes the simplest answer is the best one.
There’s just no way to make that picture look appetizing. I’ve been watching a lot of nickreboot lately, it looks like a chunk of old green slime to me. Here’s the mashed up broccoli + taters after adding the half-and-half and cooking liquid.
Looks more consistent/appetizing now. Here’s the green onions, continuing the greenness of this recipe.
After adding the onions, it was still pretty boooooring. I added in some garlic salt just to give it something without straying too far from the original recipe.
The final product, or what was left after we ate some with 6-4: Easy Stuffed Chicken Breasts. It was okay, but nothing special. It’s a very good recipe for someone who’s not picky and/or hates anything super flavorful.
Grade: C
