Last night, whilst making an admittedly somewhat unseasonal tea of bangers and mash I seem, without thinking about it, to have made PERFECT MASH!* I am annoyed about this because I have NO IDEA how I did it and thus am unable to recreate it:
1. The potatoes were saved from a bag in which one had, um, well, liquified really, in the bottom, so they weren’t exactly top of the range or fresh as a daisy.
2. There was no butter in the house, so I ended up using a dribble from the bottom of the olive oil bottle (note to self: GO SHOPPING).
3. The potatoes looked a bit dry when I first drained them, so having added a bit of hot water I put a fair old dollop of milk in.
4. As I was tenderly caring for my sossies in a Nigel Slater-esque style, slowly, gently carressing them with a low heat for that unctuous sticky marmite like covering to drip down my throat (oops, sorry, got a bit too Slateresque there) I was paying exactly 0 attention to the pots, beyond turning them up when the sossies were almost done.
*clearly PERFECT MASH is a highly subjective issue, mine was/is lump-free yet quite stiff, milky without being runny, cumulus-like and, unlike certain mashes doesn’t take c. 3 hours to make (heston did a much more complicated version of this on last night’s show, involving cooking the potatoes twice and all sorts of nonsense)