The Great Mashed Potato Controversy

We had meat loaf for dinner last night. If you have read much of my blog, you know that I hate cooking for my family, because of their vegetarian-carnivorous-eat-anything-in-your-path ways, but usually meat loaf is a good bet. Granted The Brat won't eat the meat part, but the mashed potatoes are a winner with everyone.

That is, till Thomas said he doesn't like my mashed potatoes.

This was maybe two years ago. The kid had been eating my mashed potatoes for seventeen years, and now he decides he doesn't like them? How very teenager of him. And to even TELL me, in the middle of dinner that he doesn't like them? That's even more teenager. "They're too.........starchy," says The Heir to the Throne. Gee, thanks, Bubba.

So, the quest for the perfect mashed potatoes began. From then on out, every time I've made mashed potatoes, I ask Thomas how they are. Occasionally, I get an enthusiastic answer, but more often, in perfect "eat anything in my path" manner, he just grunts "s'ok." Dan wondered what the big deal was, because he'll pretty much eat anything, anytime, and never saw the problem. Once he realized what the deal was, the real competition began, unbeknownst to me.

I went to work one night, and he had to feed them dinner. I don't even remember what the kids said he fed them, I just know that they called me at work, raving about his wonderful mashed potatoes. How in the world he did it, I'll never know, because he had never made them before this, that I knew of, and we'd bee married almost twenty years at this point, but I was totally humiliated by the wonderful reviews of those stinkin' mashed potatoes. They went one about them for what seemed like weeks, and I decided that I wasn't going to bother making them again.

That is, till we went to M.C.L. Cafeteria one night, and he confessed. Sitting right there, eating his beef Manhattan, he told me that those amazing mashed potatoes that the kids had raved about had come from M.C.L.

Good grief. He's a mashed potato imposter. Made me feel better, right off the bat. And the kids have never let him hear the end of it since. Now, whenever I make mashed potatoes and ask Thomas how they are, Seth pipes up with "compared to yours, or M.C.L.'s," and Dan slumps down in his chair, muttering something about how he "just wanted them to like the mashed potatoes." So yeah, although the mashed potatoes are generally a winner, somebody's gonna lose face, either way.

So if you want to just stick with mashed potatoes when you're dancing, instead of eating them, check out this cute
yoked shirtwaist dress pattern, from 1962 -- year of the Mashed Potato -- from my gal Jen, at momspatterns.com. It's comfort dressing at its finest.