Baked Potato Mash with Roast Garlic (Lebanon)

In my opinion, you can't really go wrong with mashed potatoes. Our family has a tried and tested method for making them though - basically a cheese garlic and onion mash. I'm sure most people have a similar sort of way to make their favourite version of mash too - but this seemed interesting so Soph and I were quite optimistic when it came to trying this recipe out.  The title is rather self explanatory and, as you can imagine, the recipe itself was quite easy, if not a little time consuming.  

The first step is baking the potatoes and the garlic.  I don't usually bake garlic, and every time Soph has done it she's left it as an entire head. This recipe however, says to split each clove up before you roast it - so that's what we did.  

  

Once that tray goes in the oven, the garlic is meant to roast for 20 minutes, then you leave the potatoes in for about another 40 minutes. So, after 20 minutes we took the rather sad-looking garlic out of the oven.  As you can see, it was a little over cooked.  Now, we know that our oven runs a little hot so we baked it 20°C lower than the recipe asked but we still lost 3 or 4 cloves in the roasting process.  On the up side, the kitchen smelled amazing.

The potatoes then carried on baking for about 40 minutes and we left them to cool - which took about another half hour or so.  We then pulled off the skins, as instructed. This process was a little messy.  One of the problems we had was that the recipe calls for baking potatoes.  Once in a while we've managed to find these in Munich but they never seem to bake quite as well as they do in the UK.  What we ended up using were quite large potatoes that we hoped would work well enough.  Sadly, they were rather difficult to peel, once baked, and so we struggled with this step. 

The next step is to start the mashing/frying process. This step was the one that took us a little by surprise. It says to mash the potatoes with a fork in a fying pan. We'd never made fried/mashed potatoes before since we usually mash them using a potato masher with a hefty amount of milk and butter.  Despite this, we persevered, worrying a little that they would turn out a little dry.  




This part of the process was quite quick - probably because Soph took on the mashing job.  If it hadn't been for her, I probably would have spent a good half hour doing this since it seemed quite fiddly.  

     

The finished product was a version of mashed potato we hadn't tried before but one that we probably won't try again. While it was tasty, it was a little too herby for our tastes.  This could have been because of the fact that we ended up with less garlic than we should have had, or because we didn't use baking potatoes.  Either way, we prefer our usual recipe.  

My brother in law said he enjoyed the potatoes and liked the amount of herbs. We kind of vetoed his opinion on this one though since he wasn't included in the very lengthy method of preparing them.  We did agree to add more herbs to our recipe though so there's a win in there somewhere.