Cooking off-piste again: Olive oil mash

I have new toy: hwsgo brought me a beautiful shiny big industrial-specification magimix for my birthday. Did I also mention terrifying? It's been lurking in its box for weeks, and I've gone from temptation to peek to fear that I've just invited into the house something with more buttons than a space shuttle and instructions that take at least a year to master, with the inherent risk of the thing exploding and raining plastic-coated food all over the kitchen. But I have a recipe (page 131, Olive Oil Mash) that calls for a food processor, so that's what I'm going to use.

But I'm not going to follow the recipe exactly: there's only one of me, I'm off on The Weekend In Spain tomorrow and although I like mash lots, I really couldn't eat enough for eight. So a smaller version (and I'll cook it properly later, honest). Now today is another lots-of-things-happening-day (bad: I may have to move just as I've finished the kitchen; good: at least I won't repeat the non-cook mistakes I made designing this one), and to add to the pressure I've been up til late on the Great Noisy Radiator Project and getting ready to go away. But I'm still going to cook, I need to cook: I need the focus today.

So what can I say? The magimix is an excellent tool, and it has only 3 buttons (on, off and pulse) but it's probably a good thing to carefully check that all the polystyrene bits are out of it before attempting to squish potatoes in it: the polystyrene held, so none of it went in the food, but I did have to clean potato off places it really wasn't designed to go. Like inside the blade-holders. The Magimix instructions are very French: pictures, but no real explanation of how to use the different-sized bowls that it came with. And the result of squishing the potatoes is definitely not mash; it's a creamy, acrylic-paint-like, smooth sauce-but-congealed that I wasn't sure whether to use a fork or spoon with. It tastes of potatoes and olives and herbs all at the same time, and I thought it was quite good until I put some of the chicken stock onto it. And the chickenstock blew it away by comparison. That really was one heck of a chicken recipe, but I'm not sure I'd take the time to make the mash again. Apart from the time that I need to tick it off on this blog.

Weight today is 168.2lbs; a rise, probably triggered by getting drunk on French beer and pigging a whole box of (not very nice) chocolates. Men eat kebabs; women, when left to their own devices with large amounts of alcohol, eat chocolate. Then have to get back onto the diet pronto before it becomes a habit. Food intake today: 1 bowl SpecialK and milk, 1 bowl soup+ 1 small bread roll, 1 SpecialK bar, 1 bag baked crisps, 1 chocolate biscuit (Sara saved some from the boys at work for me), 1 plate chicken+mash with stock, lots of water, 1 machine coffee and 1 espresso (side benefit of hiding out near the directors' area).