Dear Diary:
Big Plans
I’m in dire need of big plans. Perhaps I ought to rob a bank tomorrow — that would make for interesting reading, assuming I made it back to the apartment for long enough to write it up. As it, I am decently content, and there couldn’t be less to report. I threw away a lot of stuff today — shoe boxes full of stereo leads, for the most part. I got rid of three gigantic Sony CD carousels. I’d planned to take them to Housing Works, but they were just too bulky to contemplate schlepping. So I left them by the service elevator, with their remotes and a note that read “All in working order.” The last word, if I do say so myself, was illegible.
I reheated last week’s meat loaf for dinner, and whipped up some mashed potatoes. My record with mashed potatoes is not good. I think about it all too much. For a long time, I was convinced that priceless nutrients would be wasted if I poured off the boiling water, so I would simply cook the potatoes down into a sort of soup — quite revolting. Even worse was the session with the KitchenAid stand mixer. Glue resulted — as you know if you’ve tried it. I asked my good friend JKM how she makes mashed potatoes, and her counsel was sage. No — no sage! Just butter and cream. She reminded me to use a ricer. I have a dandy ricer, but I never think to use it when I’m trying to mash potatoes, which, given my history, is not often. Or I haven’t until now. Tonight’s mashed potatoes were, quite simply, perfect. Nice ricer.
This is all too thrilling. I can’t even think about robbing a bank.
Maybe what I’ll do is run out to Los Angeles and rob my friend George Snyder. He never said anything about his “extensive collection of Made-In-Occupied-Japan figurines” until just the other day, and although I had never known that such things existed (oh, I’d known, all right; I just hadn’t known known), I’ve conceived a retrospective passion for them that we needn’t delve into here. How big, though, is “extensive”?
I, too, had a disaster when attempting to make mashed potatoes with a KitchenAid stand mixer. I was making a shepherd’s pie and was short on time. Never again! The ricer is definitely the way to go. But sometime you must try ‘Alabaster,’ a mixture of mashed potatoes and white turnips. It’s wonderful.
Mashed potatoes and mashed parsnips in a ratio of 3 to 1 is ambrosia. Add lots of butter and a touch of cream. And gray sea salt in just the right amount, not a grain under or over.