Every week we’ll post a recipe that we both made. This week’s recipe was Mashed Potato Casserole, found over at The Southern Lady Cooks. Printable recipe can be found at the bottom of this post.

Robyn’s Take:

This week’s recipe was my choice, and I don’t remember how I came across it. Pinterest, maybe? Just in the course of catching up on my blog reading? It’s a mystery how I found it, but I immediately thought it sounded really good, because I like mashed potatoes, and I like everything else that goes into this casserole, so I figured it HAD to be good.

The ingredients:

Potatoes (duh), sour cream, cream cheese (I used Neufchatel, which is some magical thing made of air and fairy dust that tastes just like cream cheese only has WAY less calories and fat. Or something.), onion flakes, evaporated milk, garlic powder, paprika, butter, Monterey Jack cheese.

Peel the potatoes, quarter them, throw them in a pot of water, and put it on the stove, on high heat.

Polly Pickle was the Kitchen Inspector on duty today. But there was an issue.

Apparently butter scares the holy hell out of her. She was NOT having it, and she fled the counter and couldn’t be convinced to return.

Look, the potatoes are boiling:

Boil those things ’til they’re fork-tender. This means, if this is your first day on Earth, that when you poke at random potato pieces, the fork should pierce them easily. If you have to put some effort behind it, they’re not done. It took my potatoes about 12 minutes of boiling. Yours might take longer. Or less time. Whatevs.

When they’re done, drain ’em!

Throw everything in a mixing bowl and mix together ’til smooth. Or until the lumps are the size you prefer. I kind of like a few lumps in my mashed potatoes, personally.

From her safe spot, far far away from the scary butter, Inspector Polly Pickles supervised.

“I don’t know what you’re doing, but rest assured you’re doin’ it wrong. ::slurrp::”

Dump your mashed potatoes into a baking dish. I used a Pyrex 2.5-liter dish, and it was the perfect size.

Sprinkle Monterey Jack cheese on top. I used 1 cup; you might want to use 2. Whatever works for you works for me.

Sprinkle with paprika. I didn’t measure mine, just shook some out and called it good enough.

Bake for 30 – 35 minutes. Check out THIS lovely picture.

It looks slightly better dished up:

The verdict? Meh.

I thought for sure it was going to be exceedingly, amazing wonderful, that we would both immediately adore it, and decide to have it every night for the rest of our lives. Instead, it was just okay. Honestly, I prefer plain old mashed potatoes (and they’re easier and faster to make!). At this point I don’t have any plans to make it again.

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Nance’s take:

One minute Robyn is sending me disgustingly healthy recipes for things like chocolate pie made out of figs mixed with weeds and the next thing you know, mashed potato casserole.  She cracks my shit up.

This is where I’m going to confess my dirty little secret…

NO, this is not a sponsored post!  My secret is that I never make real mashed potatoes.  We always use this brand and we get it at Sam’s Club.   Why?  No instant mashed potato aftertaste.  Anybody who has eaten instant potatoes knows what I’m talking about.  And these are cheap and easy (insert bad joke about my being a slut here).

If you think I had anything to do with the peeling and boiling of these potatoes, you are very much mistaken. My mother was called in for peeling duty because I suck at it. Be jealous because Shirley lives at my house. But don’t be too jealous because there’s a reason we call her Grandma Tube-top. I guess you gotta take the good with the bad sometimes.  Heh.

I was the one doing the mashing after I spent 15 minutes trying to find the damn masher thingie because we never use it.

Maddy would like to know why I am fussing around with potatoes when I should be opening a can of that nasty ass cat food that she loves so much. Since we have started her on wet cat food she has turned into a bully. A very VOCAL BULLY. For those of you not in-the-know, Maddy was the first bottle-fed baby that Robyn fostered. Yes, I drove the whole way to Alabama to adopt Satan’s spawn.  I never said I was a genius.

This is where I started to get annoyed. I don’t know about anybody else, but I go a little crazy when I have to open up containers for just a little bit of ingredients. The evaporated milk. The half block of cream cheese. The sour cream. I was shitting myself about being so wasteful!

So far, so good. But I was still annoyed with all of the new containers of food I had to open.

I used Monterey Jack cheese for the top.

This is what it looked like when it came out of the oven.  I suppose I could have broiled it for a few minutes, but eh, by the time this came out of the oven I didn’t care about presentation.  Shh, I know that I never care about presentation, but let’s just go with it.

On a plate.

My mother and Rick loved it. Raved about it. Blahblahblah. Me? I was unimpressed. It wasn’t bad. But I couldn’t get past the massive amount of calories and fat this probably had in it. I suppose one could use the recipe with leftover mashed potatoes, but I just can’t imagine setting out to make this recipe on purpose.

Felina the chihuahua was very unsure about this mashed potato business.

But after trying it she decided that it was lick your entire face good!  Just don’t tell my mom that the dog’s on the table, okay?

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