Dinner Results
I’m glad to say that Sunday dinner went swimmingly. The ham was both beautiful and delicious; the deviled eggs were easy (even if using a spoon does work, I still say that a pastry bag is easier) and delicious—I included capers in the yolk mix, and thought they were a nice touch. The marinated roasted portabello mushrooms were slightly overdone, but not offensively so. The maple tiramisu was divine, if I do say so myself. Really, the only problem was the mashed potatoes, and even then, it was only a problem of presentation.
I had planned on mashing a pot each of irish and sweet potatoes, putting each type in a small pastry bag, both bags in a larger bag, and piping out twisty-cone style mixed potatoes. Then, because there was a limit of how many pots and burners I have to work with, and because Julia Child recommends baking potatoes and then mashing them, I decided to give that a shot. But, really, you should only try one new thing at a time.
The larger sweet potatoes were still fairly hard by the time people had arrived and it was time to mash them. Rather than admit they weren’t ready and just mash the smaller ones, I tried to force them into submission. Then, I added way too much milk and butter to them and wound up with some fairly loose potatoes that I then tried to tighten by adding some irish in with them to soak up some of the liquid. It didn’t work, plus there were still the large chunks of potatoes in with the mush that obstructed the pastry bag opening until forced out by an excessively hard squeeze, resulting in a diarrheal onslaught of loose potatoes following it. I gave up on the presentation and just put piles of potatoes next to each other on the plates.
Really, though, if you’re cooking for a dozen people and the worst thing that happens is you can’t make the potatoes look uber-fancy, you’re in pretty good shape. I had a great time and I’m glad that so many of my friends could come for the meal.
April 10th, 2007 at 9:26 am
Everything about the meal sounded great until I got to “diarrheal”. I think there’s a reason you rarely see that word in food writing.
April 10th, 2007 at 11:32 am
I’m going to have to agree with jeremy on this one. I really hope you didn’t use that description as you were serving your guests!
April 10th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
No, that description wasn’t used; but unfortunately, that’s as accurate a description of the process as I can muster; the characterization in my mind was a key reason why I abandoned the effort to pipe the potatoes.
April 10th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Sounds good, I like ham. We grilled some lamb on the ol’ Weber — mighty tasty after a vegetarian Lenten fast. No potatoes either, diarrheal or not.
April 11th, 2007 at 10:28 am
The meal sounds very good. We had “Amanda’s Sweet Potatoes” with our ham and they were very good. We also had “Jeremy’s Roasted Asparagus” and it was good also. Too bad they weren’t here to share the meal with us.
Also too bad that you didn’t think to pop those underdone sweet potatoes into the microwave for a couple minutes. You would have still had the flavor of oven roasted and they would have finished cooking very fast. Now I know why I always just pile my mashed potatoes into a bowl and don’t worry about doing a fancy presentation.
I’m glad the ham was up to par. Ours was good also. There’s nothing like that ham! It is the only ham we had when I was young and as a result nothing else quite measures up.