I’ve forgotten what it is like to have a weekly deadline to making a dish and knowing that I still have to make sure that my long-suffering editor (hi, Leah!) still has time to review the column and push it out on Friday mornings.
I am writing this up on Thursday night, the absolutely latest that I can write Cooking Eorzea, if I want to get it out on time. I am definitely falling back into good, happy, routines every day and every week that make me happy. Things aren’t super great in my life at the moment, and so it makes those small glimpses of enjoyment -such as when I lose myself in cooking some new dish- all the more precious.
This series is actively making me plan ahead too- I know that for next week’s dish, I have all the ingredients on hand but one, and that one ingredient I am going to be ordering tonight once I have this ready for my editor.
At some point, unfortunately, I will have looped my way through every dish, and I’ll be making the Minstrel’s Ballad version of Almond Cream Croissants. Thankfully, that day is still quite aways away. And since I don’t have wings to carry me to heaven and the end of this series, it looks like I will have to walk instead by making each remaining dish with Love, Eorzean Style.
If you’ve missed an installment of Cooking Eorzea, you can check out all the prior recipes here.
Recipe of the Week
Hailing once again from the Thanalan region of Eorzea, this week’s Recipe (with a difficulty level of ‘Easy’) is Mashed Popotoes! This is the 52nd dish in The Official FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook as well.
This looks like it is an incredibly simple, and incredibly creamy, recipe, and I can’t wait to see how it turns out in this week’s Cooking Eorzea entry. I’ve made something akin to this, mashed potatoes, before- but it’s always literally just been potatoes, butter, and salt/pepper. So, this is decidedly more complex than what I am used to doing (but not by THAT much more, honestly).
But first, as always, here is how the dish looks when it is made by a professional:
Featured Ingredient of the Week
The thing about Russet potatoes is that they are quite drier than other potatoes, which makes them great for cooking or for frying into French fries or potato chips. For my purposes, Russet potatoes are great for mashing into dishes as well. It is crazy how something so…simple…is so versatile, really.
Russet potatoes ended up being the ingredient of the week by almost default, as they are the single ingredient that Mashed Popotoes really revolves around! If you don’t have potatoes, you don’t have this dish, after all.
My Cooking Attempt
It turns out that there aren’t a lot of ingredients needed for Mashed Popotoes:
First, I peeled the Russet potatoes and then weighed out exactly a pound of them.
I then chopped the potatoes up with a knife.
Setting the chopped potatoes aside, I crushed a garlic bulb, shook them inside a container, and then peeled off the remaining bits to get eight garlic cloves.
I set a large pot over high heat and then added the potatoes and garlic in. I covered them up with water and then added salt in.
I brought it up to a boil and then lowered it to a simmer and let it all sit for 20 minutes so that the potatoes could soften up.
Once my timer went off, I drained the potatoes and garlic out through a strainer.
I put the large pot back onto medium heat, and then added in the butter, cottage cheese, and sour cream. I then blended them all together until it was smooth.
I then added in the potatoes and garlic, and I mashed it all together until it was as smooth as I could get it. I used a plastic potato masher, and so it turned out that a LOT of work was going into making these true Mashed Popotoes.
Once that was done, I added in salt and pepper to taste!
And here is the final dish for this week’s Cooking Eorzea: Mashed Popotoes!
The Mashed Popotoes were incredibly creamy, and you could really tell how much the cottage cheese, butter, and sour cream had an impact. I couldn’t get over how much it produced and how delicious it was. I ended up almost eating one of the bowls as a snack for myself, but I refrigerated the leftovers to have later on.
This was absolutely a worthwhile side to make, as long as whoever you’re cooking for doesn’t mind it being more complicated than what you’d usually get.
Afterword
I think that if I was going to make this dish again, I would definitely work with a better masher. It was incredibly hard and annoying to smooth the Mashed Popotoes out, and something better than a flimsy plastic masher would have done wonders. Otherwise, this was incredibly easy to make!
Time to dive into the ‘thank yous’! I am goning to start this off by thanking Victoria Rosenthal for writing The Ultimate FINAL FANTASY XIV Online Cookbook, and I also want to thank the staff over at Insight Editions for giving me permission to use the photos from their book to show how these recipes look when a true chef makes them. I can only hope that I can emulate these with my own attempts!
Furthermore, I owe Brandon Rose a special thanks for creating the logo for this series on short notice. You should check him and his works out over on X.
Finally, I want to thank both Hiromichi Tanaka and Naoki Yoshida for producing FINAL FANTASY XIV Online in both iterations of the game. It’s crazy to think about how far Eorzea has grown and where we are now as an online community. Now, if only there was another FanFest to attend this year…and hopefully new recipes for me to make in Cooking Eorzea.
Next Week
What happens when you use five different types of mushrooms to make a side dish?!
You get Mushroom Sauté! Hailing from the Norvrandt Region, it promises to be something interesting to make next week. And yes, this dish will be happening once I order the one type of mushrooms that I cannot get in-person online.
Please return next Friday to see how this recipe goes in another installment of Cooking Eorzea!
How do you like to make your Mashed Popotoes? What routines are you falling into, if any?
Let us know in the comments below!