check out this potato expert daaaamn
you irish corporal?
Nope, Bavarian. We got the tater a full 60 years after the Irish (1590-ish/1650-ish), but our love and appreciation for the heavenly earth apple shall not lose out to them!
As a single guy, I love the tater for being such a forgiving torture subject.
At least, most of the time.
First attempts at making mashed taters were a rather horrific failure. Too much salt -> add sugar -> now sweet -> add more salt -> barf. Still ate it. Early single days sans internet were ...rough.
Done right it's very much worth the trouble however, even though instant powder is so much more convenient.
A dash of Nutmeg + a good chunk of butter on self made mashed potatoes = happy Corporal.
I do however encourage the lazy approach to tater consumption. Boil them whole (depending on the type peel them or not), sprinkle with salt, butter and a side dish of cubes from good cheese. One bite of buttered salted tater alternated with a cheese cube. Such an easy and tasty and most of all quick meal. Butter alternative: Herb quark. Mmmmmh.
If you have a cucumber slicer and a pan with leftover lard/bacon grease/etc, you can just heat it on high and shred the (depends: peeled) raw taters into the hot and tasty fat. Turn down the heat to avoid charring. Add some caraway seed, because bitches love caraway seeds. Salt to taste. Ideally, there will be some leftover bacon cubes, but it's not really necessary. Remember to stir the pan well.
(Onions are also good with that, obviously diced and browned. Don't underestimate the heated pan though, onion coal tastes horrible even if the taters turned out well. Sigh. Newbie error.)
You can even turn the heat to low midway through, add a good bit of cream to the half-roasted tater slices and cover it until the cream has mostly soaked in. (Stir occasionally!) Sprinkle some grated cheese on that, if you want. You can also use milk instead of cream, if you have no cream at home and a crippling aversion to good food and yummy calories.
All of that also accommodates leftovers from the day before. Meat cubes, gravy, veggies, old sausage/ham/tofu, whatever it is, put it in a pan, add some taters (see my "Tiroler Gröstl" post in the other thread), maybe a sunny side up eggo, and blammo, you have a damn fine meal.
Boil small taters whole in rather salty water, preheat the oven, take the cooked taters out and, still wet, throw them into the oven. When they dry the salt will crystallise on the outside as a kind of crust. Delish, again you can add some caraway seeds or rosemary to add a bit of spice. Eat them hot or cold, pure or with a simple dip, however you like.
Potatoes are a single guy's best friends. Rice, bread and noodles get boring after a while, but taters are always there for you, ever changing, enduring and caring for you, doing their best to stay out of your way. Embrace them as you would a lover, and you will never go hungry.
