Ben's Day Wednesday

One Potato, Two Potato, Three Potato, Four

Posted on by Liz


Over Thanksgiving, we were in Virginia helping my parents prepare for their big move to a retirement home. We were home in Pennsylvania for two days before Phil returned to help them finish the move. In that two-day window, Phil made a batch of mashed potatoes so large that Ben and I were nearly defeated by its looming presence in the fridge. If you find yourself with a sizable quantity of mashed potatoes, and you aren’t quite sure what to do, take a page from our potato palooza playbook.


Day One Potato – Trust the Gorton’s fisherman for some easy fish sticks. Serve with fresh mashed potatoes. (Not pictured because who could have foretold the potato saga that would unfold?)

Day Two Potato – Whisk some mashed potatoes with milk over low heat to make potato soup. Top with shredder (shredded cheddar), bacon, sour cream, and if you were thinking ahead, chives.

Need a recipe for the soup? Click below for its original debut on the blog. Then Day 2 referred to our number of days into pandemic isolation. Wow.

Day 2 – Happy St. Patrick’s Day!
Day Three Potato – Add flour, a bit of baking powder and some salt to mashed potatoes to make a dough for tattie scones. Pat into disks and cook in a skillet like a flour tortilla. Serve plain, with sautéed mushrooms, or with any other topping that sounds good to you alongside a bowl of soup.
Here, Chef Ben does a shoddy job cleaning mushrooms for the scones to get ejected from the job. Try again, friend. I am married to your father, and he has never made the bed properly, or even passably in 34 years. I will endure a little dirt on mushrooms if it means teaching you that I won’t swoop in and do the job for you when you feign incompetence.

Need a tattie scone recipe? Here’s the link:

Slow Food
Day Four – On a weekend morning, finish off the spud that keeps on giving by making shirred eggs with potato purée.

Again, recipe below. Hey, everyone else does a clip show. Why not us?

Tender Roots


It’s been awhile… How about a puzzle? (This is like the NYT Connections puzzle.) Find, click, and submit four things you think should be grouped together (one potato, two potato, three potato, four) until you have placed all 16 items into four categories. Warning: Phil found this one very difficult, but he is still confounded by hospital corners, so…

https://connections.swellgarfo.com/game/-ODmm4iSRvMbY_W0xrPF