What’s Cookin’, Good Lookin’?

I know it’s still a little over 2 months before Thanksgiving, but there’s no time like the present to start sharing some ideas for your holiday table.  For me, Thanksgiving and Christmas are the only redeeming factors to fall and winter so I start planning and anticipating them early!  I absolutely love the holidays!  They’re all about family and bringing them to the table together.  And I’m all about that!  To me, there’s nothing better this side of heaven than having your family around the table together sharing the love of good food.

So I thought I’d go ahead and start sharing some holiday cooking and baking ideas with you now in case you’re a little OCD like me and have to plan, plan, PLAN in advance.  And if you’re not, go ahead and make this for Thursday night dinner!  It’s all good!

This is simply a new spin on plain old mashed potatoes.  Not that there’s anything wrong with plain old mashed potatoes.  I love them too!  But sometimes you just want something a little new and different.  This is how you can take a classic and make it even better.  Mashed potatoes are a comfort food for me.  I think they probably are for most folks.  So they show up on my table a LOT…….in lots of different ways.  This is one of them.

Here’s what you’ll need:

Potatoes, sour cream, butter, heavy whipping cream, fresh cracked pepper, garlic, sweet onions and salt.  Forgive me for forgetting to set the garlic in the photo.  If you’ve been reading around here very long, you know to expect garlic in just about everything, huh?

Start out by peeling the potatoes if you want.  If you’re using small red potatoes, you could certainly boil them whole and leave the skins on when you do the mashing.  It’s entirely up to you!  But for this recipe, I did peel the potatoes.

Put them on to boil.  Now leave them alone while we’re getting those amazing caramelized onions ready!  Soon, your kitchen it going to smell so good it will knock you down!

Put a skillet on the stove to get hot and add the stick of butter.  Let the butter melt over medium heat while you’re cutting up the onion.

Hello, Love!  Sweet onions!  Ahhhhhhh, bliss, I tell you!  I adore sweet onions!  Vidalias, 1015s from TX, just gimme some sweet onions!  We’re soon going to make this one even sweeter!

You’ll want to chop off both ends of the onion first.  Then remove the peeling from the outside layer.

Set the onion up on its end and cut it down the middle like this.

Now lay it over on the flat side and begin cutting it into half-rings.  I like them fairly thin for this.

Then I cut each “half-ring” into thirds to make shorter pieces.  Since you’ll be adding these to mashed potatoes, you don’t want really large pieces.

The butter’s just about ready.  Turn the heat up on high to get it really sizzling before adding the onions.

Now slide the onions off into the sizzling butter.  And excuse this really dark photo……I’m not exactly sure what happened to make it so dark.

Throw in that garlic I forgot to put in the “What You’ll Need” photo!

Now add a few grinds of fresh pepper.  I especially love the larger pieces of peppercorn in this dish!  But if you’re STILL holding out on buying that pepper grinder and using fresh cracked pepper, plain old pepper will work fine.  Add in the salt here too.

OH MY GOODNESS!  OH MY GOODNESS!  OH MY GOODNESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I wish I had a pan of these RIGHT NOW!!!!!!  Have I mentioned how much I love onions?  These are just about ready!  Just a few more minutes.  The brown is the “caramelized” part.  It’s the natural sugars in the onion caramelizing like sugar would if you cooked it like this.

The onions are almost done and I bet your potatoes are nearly done too!  So warm the heavy cream in the microwave.  You don’t want to boil it.  Just get it warmed through and through so you’re not pouring cold liquid into hot potatoes.

Give the potatoes a good drain.  You don’t want any of that cooking liquid left behind because it will just dilute all the incredible flavor you’re working so hard to put into these babies!

Pour the drained potatoes into your mixer bowl.

Now let’s whip them!  They’ve been very, VERY bad potatoes.  But with a good whippin’, we’re going to make them good!

Start slowly pouring in that warmed heavy cream.  Adding warmed liquid to your mashed potatoes helps avoid them becoming “gluey” like they do when adding cold liquid.  You’ll want the mixer on a low speed while you’re doing this or you’ll be cleaning mashed potatoes off your kitchen cabinets from now until spring!  And I don’t know about you, but cleaning mashed potatoes off my cabinets is not exactly my idea of big fun!

Once you have whipped the potatoes until all the lumps are gone, you’re ready to add the onions.  Pour them in to the potatoes while the mixer is off.  Restart the mixer and just incorporate them.  No need to whip them anymore.  They have promised to never, EVER be bad again!

And finally, because they weren’t decadent enough already, add the sour cream and turn the mixer on low again until it’s just blended in.

At this point, if any of the local stores could have been bothered to carry it, I would have added some Gruyere cheese.  Gruyere cheese is a Swiss-made cheese with a very creamy, nutty flavor.  It’s vastly different from what we traditionally know as “Swiss cheese.”  It doesn’t typically have the large holes in it that we commonly think of Swiss cheese having.  When aged, it can develop holes, but the younger, nuttier cheese will not.  I VERY MUCH wanted some in these potatoes.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to make a trip to Whole Foods to pick up any before I made them.  So they went without.  But if you have time to plan ahead of time for these and can make a trip to Nashville or Birmingham or anywhere else there’s a Whole Foods, I highly recommend buying a small piece of Gruyere to grate for these potatoes!

Caramelized Onion Mashed Potatoes

*  8-10 medium potatoes, peeled and diced

*  1 large sweet onion

*  1 stick butter

*  2 cups heavy whipping cream

*  1/2 cup sour cream

*  salt, fresh cracked pepper and fresh garlic to taste

*  1 cup Gruyere cheese, grated

Peel and dice potatoes.  Boil potatoes until tender and drain well.  Melt stick of butter in skillet.  Prepare onion by slicing off each end and removing the peel.  Cut in half then slice into thin half-rings.  Cut each section of half-rings into thirds.  Add to hot butter in skillet.  Stir to coat each piece of onion with butter.  Add garlic, black pepper and salt.  Continue cooking onions until they become a nutty brown color.  Whip potatoes with a mixer, slowly adding the heavy whipping cream until the potatoes are silky and smooth.  Add the onions and sour cream and mix just until they are incorporated into the potatoes.  Add cheese and mix once more until all the cheese is evenly distributed throughout the potatoes.  Serve immediately.

If you can’t get your hands on any Gruyere cheese, you *can* substitute other cheeses, but I don’t recommend it.  I certainly don’t recommend using a bag of pre-shredded cheese.  I’m not too good to use pre-shredded cheese.  I use it all the time.  However, just not in this dish.  Those onions have such a delicate flavor, you don’t want to overpower it by using a super strong cheese.  You worked hard to make those onions taste the way they do, so don’t make them the red-headed step-child of this dish by using a cheese that would totally come in like the ADHD child and take over the dish.  KWIM?

I was inspired to come home and make these after eating something similar in a steakhouse.  It was like eating mashed potatoes with THE BEST French Onion Soup you can imagine inside the mashed potatoes.  So I was determined to create the same thing at home.  And these were born!

As you can see from the top photo, I served them with a grilled pork chop.  But they are amazing with a grilled steak like I originally had them in the steakhouse.  They would be fabulous with grilled chicken or roast beef!  And if you do want to serve them for the holidays, these would be absolutely spectacular with a brown sugar-glazed ham or a prime rib!

I hope these make your mouth water just looking at them and thinking about them like they do mine!  And I hope they give you a new idea for a different spin on mashed potatoes for your holiday table, your Sunday dinner table or your Thursday night table!

Have a great day!  Thanksgiving is exactly 11 weeks from tomorrow!

Filed under: Christmas/Holidays, Recipes, Side Dishes, Thanksgiving Ideas, Vegetables