Hey all,

Here’s my latest Food 101 column, which appeared today in the print version of The Orange County Register. It’s not online on the paper’s site, so I’ve posted it below. Thanks for reading!

Potatoes to the rescue
The creamy, mashed dish is a smashing success with most any main course.

By CYNTHIA FUREY
Special to the Register

Stories of superheroes and sidekicks have lined the pages of comic books for ages. Though it’s true that quite of few of these superheroes perform their mighty deeds alone, many of them do have help. The same rings true for main courses and sides: Both have lined your dinner table for ages, mightily feeding your friends, family and dinner guests. But unlike superheroes, something seems amiss when a main course appears without accompaniment. Yes, that beef tenderloin is a glorious spectacle on its own, but it would benefit from an equally glorious supporting cast of characters to share the table with.

Enter mashed potatoes, one of those classic sidekicks that work with almost all protein dishes. Dress them up with Parmesan and mash them until they’re silky, and you can serve them with an elegant roast. Add cheddar with potatoes and their skins, and you’ve got a dish you can take to a picnic or barbecue. Every good cook should have at least one mashed potato recipe in their back pocket, at the ready for when you need to fill a vacant slot on your menu.

I call my own recipe Kitchen Sink Mashed Potatoes, because it seems there’s a little bit of everything in them. Now, I must warn you, these mashed potatoes aren’t for the faint of heart, or those who want to fit into their bathing suits this summer. They will stick to your like the Freshmen 15 you gained in college, like the clingy significant other you eventually managed to shake off. The red potatoes in this recipe merely act as a vehicle for butter, cheese and cream. (But in the recipe’s defense, that can also be said for many mashed potato recipes.)

What they do lack in modesty, however, they make up for in flavor. For one, there’s the aforementioned trifecta of ingredients that seem to make everything taste better, while also functioning in the recipe as texture helpers: Butter and heavy cream add creaminess and fluff, while Parmesan cheese gives them a bit of tang. There’s also enough garlic in them that there’s a chance you may still taste them next week. (If you’re not a garlic fan, by all means, scale back on the quantity called for below.) A touch of chicken stock beefs them up.

While the potatoes are cooling it helps to have a mise en place (a French phrase that literally translates to “everything in place” or “putting in place”). Grate your cheese, chop your garlic and measure all liquids and spices and place them around your work area within an arms distance. When the time comes for you to add these ingredients, you won’t have to stop what you’re doing to measure, pour or chop. It helps to have a mise en place with all recipes.

Kitchen Sink Mashed Potatoes call for grated Parmesan cheese, but you can substitute with other Italian hard cheeses like Asiago or Romano, or a blend of all of them. Mild and sharp cheddar cheese will also work well. Red rose potatoes are used because they can be boiled without breaking down (like their Russet siblings). It’s your choice to keep the potato skins on or off.

You can make them a day ahead of time, stored in refrigerator and reheated on the stove in a pot or in the microwave in a bowl. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for recipe)

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I’d like to write a book.
There, I said it.

That’s something I’ve had trouble admitting to people, for fear of them saying something like “You? A book? What makes you think you’re interesting/knowledgeable/talented enough to write a book?”

But after the Symposium for Professional Food Writers conference, I don’t have trouble telling people this anymore. After you sheepishly admit something like that to Michael Ruhlman himself while at dinner one night, you kind of get over your fear. His responses: “I wanted to write a book when I was your age, too,” followed by, “About what?” and “Why?” Hmm.

Well, I want to write about food. I want to write about food and memory and life and love and all that. Memoir-style. Because I’ve been blessed with a multiracial background, with a loving mother stuck in the ways of pre-war Vietnam, who tried to raise her child in that old manner in this new country. Because there’s a lot to explore in this often hot-blooded mother-daughter relationship, both culturally and personally, that I hope can help other mother-daughter teams out there understand their own relationship dynamics.

Even more, because there’s a story in my Irish/Italian father, too. He’s a lover of Mexican food who told me that he believes he’s an alien from another planet, sent to Earth because his brother wanted to be king of said planet. My father apparently was next in line for the throne. A year later, I would meet him for the first time in 22 years.

And because I believe food heals. Not in the way a person temporarily binges away depression, or in the medicinal or nutritious way, but in that can’t-put-your-finger-on-it, soul-calming way. If you let it, it will assemble you back together and make you whole again. People really need to know that food can do this. It’s certainly done this for me.

I kinda wish I wasn’t embarrassed to detail this to Ruhlman when he asked. I said something along the lines of “I don’t know, I have time; I’ll figure it out.” He probably would have given me some great advice. (Click on “Read the rest of this entry” for more)

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This week I’ve been at the Greenbrier in  West Virginia for the annual Symposium for Professional Food Writers. The bad news is that it’s coming to a close tomorrow, but the good news (well, for me anyway!) is that I’ll be back to blogging. I’ll report back with interesting tidbits and such next week.  Have a lovely weekend!

In fourth grade summer school, I met a girl named Vanessa, the first person I had ever known with a Spanish accent.

The minute she opened her mouth, her foreign accent trumped my ordinary American one: she was instantly prettier, smarter and funnier than me – and boy, was I jealous. I hated her, yet I still had this strange urge to be her friend. (The term frenemy would be coined almost 20 years later to describe this phenomenon.)

Since I knew not a word of Spanish, I practiced speaking English the Spanish way – Vanessa’s way. “S” sounding words were replaced with a “th”: “Sour Patch Kids” became “Thour Path Kidth.” “Hey Vanessa, push me on the swing” became “Hey Vane-tha, puth me on the thwing.” My heavy American tongue proved useless in producing an enviable accent, and instead, words sounded swollen and lethargic. But as usual, Vanessa would flit about, speaking in that singsong voice of hers, and I swear if we had been in a cartoon there would have been a forest, birds and Disney animals hanging onto her every syllable.

But I would learn that her accent had an Achilles Heel. There was one word she couldn’t really say: “chips.” I laughed the hardest at her expense when she asked to share my bag of potato “ships.”

“Ships?” I would ask incredulously. “You mean chips. Say it again!”
“Ships.”
“Ahahahahahahahaha!” I cackled. “Chips!”
“Ships.”
“Ahahahahahahahaha!”

I tried to make her say the word in front of boys we liked in a desperate, fourth-grade attempt to embarrass her. (In addition to frenemy behavior, the second social lesson I learned that summer was that all was fair in love and war.)

But, as life would have it, my plan backfired. Boys still thought she was charming and lovely, despite the sound of her voice mistaking a popular snack food for a massive watercraft. Soon, everyone was eating ships. It was enough for me to finally give up sabotaging her – and it would be the last lesson I learned that summer: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

I never saw Vanessa again, but I’d like to believe she’s maintained her charming accent and is still eating ships. In fact, if Vanessa were an avid cook who wanted to make her own ships, I wouldn’t expect them to be of the Russet variety. They would be familiar yet foreign. Like these sweet potato chips. They’re familiar enough, but with fresh rosemary plucked from a backyard shrub and a sprinkle of sea salt, they become elegant and extraordinary. Like her accent was.

Click on this link for the recipe, from Leite’s Culinaria.

– Cynthia Furey