As promised, I’m giving you my mashed potatoes recipe. But let me warn you now, it was a bit of a disaster. Quite a massacre, actually. I don’t know where the recipe-writer is from, and I really should have known better because around here you cannot oven-bake potatoes in 20-30 minutes. To give myself a little credit, the potatoes were small. And I don’t bake them in the oven very often. (Ok never ~ I’m a microwaved potatoes kind of girl.) And yes, I used Yukon golds instead of reds. (Love love love the Yukon golds and they happened to have some at the store where I shopped for our double-take-giving items ~ not Wal-Mart. Stoopid [yes, I spelled it that way on purpose] Wal-Mart hasn’t had them in in forever.) But I know from watching my mother cook a hundred billion Sunday dinners that potatoes just don’t bake in 20-30 minutes. So if you’re going to try this recipe, please add bake time appropriate to your area and the size of your potatoes. That being said, here’s the recipe:
Bennigan’s Garlic Mashed Potatoes
1 pound red potatoes
3 tablespoons butter
¼ cup half and half or milk
4 cloves roasted garlic
To really get their flavor, these potatoes need to be baked, not boiled. So bake them in a 350° oven for about 20-30 minutes. This would be a great time to roast that garlic too. You can either use a traditional roaster, or you may wrap a bulb of garlic in foil and roast that – be sure to coat the bulb with some olive oil before you roast it.
Remove potatoes from oven and allow them to cool. You can leave the peelings on or off; I like to leave a few of them on. Chop potatoes, add butter, and half and half, and mix with an electric mixer. Add cloves of garlic, and salt and pepper to taste. You will want to heat these potatoes in a saucepan until they warm up again.
We don’t have a Bennigan’s where I live. From what I read on the website there isn’t a Bennigan’s where anyone lives anymore, but I had never even heard of Bennigan’s before finding this recipe. These potatoes just sounded really good, so I thought I’d give them a try. I even put my garlic in a little foil wrapper and put it in the oven with my potatoes. That didn’t come out done in 30 minutes. Did I mention that yet? It really, totally irked me that I was so sillily stoopid. (The word of the day is stoopid ~ it means so stupid that you can’t even spell stupid, and I totally felt that way for being such an idiot.) All of dinner was done and I went to mash the potatoes in my handy dandy fairly new stand mixer. I put in the butter, I put in the cream, I put in the garlic. I bent my whisky thingy on the undone potatoes and sprayed the kitchen and myself with the butter, the cream, the garlic and little chunks of potatoes. At this point I’m feeling humiliatingly stoopid (come on, say it with me: STOOPID) in front of my father-in-law who came to share our yummy double-take-giving feast. Dumped everything in a glass 9x13 and stuck it in the microwave for 10 minutes. Still mostly hard. Stuck it back in the microwave for another 10 minutes. Meanwhile, the carrots, the corn, the TURKEY, the rolls are all getting cold. Boo!
After 20 minutes in the microwave they still weren’t particularly soft and squishy, but they did break apart with a fork so I poured everything back in the Kitchen Aid ~ using my porcelain thingy this time, and the little plastic thingy that fits around the rim to prevent food-flinging ~ and turned it on. Poured in more cream. Poured in some milk. Poured in some more milk. Plopped in about 4 ounces of cream cheese. Added some salt and some more milk. By this time we were all starving, everything but the gravy bubbling happily away on the stove was cold and I gave up. Don’t know if you can see the lumpiness of the potatoes, but they were almost, but not quite, entirely unlike mashed potatoes. 1 Before ever tasting them my husband dubbed them M-Style Mashed Potatoes, thinking, in my opinion, to tease me ever after with how horribly they turned out. However, he decided they were quite good and actually like the lumpiness. Go figure.
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