Slow Cooking Mashed Potatoes

With Thanksgiving almost here, I thought that this would be a perfect recipe to try. Thank you FirstADream.blogspot.com!  When I saw their recipe for Mashed Potatoes in a Crockpot, I had to try it!  Anything to make Thanksgiving dinner less hectic.

I hate making mashed potatoes the traditional way.  You have to boil your potatoes in a big pot with a lot of water, make sure it doesn't boil over, and then drain off the water (and the nutrients that seeped out during cooking) without burning yourself.  If you overcook them in all that water, you might end up with a whole lot of glue.  Call me lazy, but it's just too much work for such a simple side dish.

Their recipe calls for very little water and you don't drain it off! Mash it, whip it and serve it all from the crock, if you wish. So easy!  You could use the Reynold's liners to make clean up super easy (if only cooking in the crockpot). Dump the food in the crock and cook without having to babysit it.  It's practically foolproof! 

The Recipe

Slow Cooker Mashed Potatoes

5 lbs potatoes, peeled and cubed
1 cup water or broth
1 cup butter, cut into chunks
1 tablespoon salt
¾ teaspoon ground black pepper
1 1/3 cups milk

Place the potatoes, water, and butter into a slow cooker.  Season with salt and pepper.  Cover, and cook on High for 2-3 hours, or until tender. (Large potato pieces may need more cooking time.)  Do not drain.  Mash potatoes with a masher or electric beater, adding milk and seasonings for desired texture. 

Freezing Homemade Biscuits

First of all, I want to give full credit for this project to Favorite Freezer Foods.com for their Easy Homemade Biscuits Recipe.

The recipe is a standard, simple biscuit recipe -- nothing to write home about... or blog about... but I thought the recipe's instructions were definitely worth sharing. 

The recipe tells you how to freeze the biscuits individually before baking them, so that you can throw them in a freezer bag for storage.  Then you can have hot, fresh biscuits anytime with minimal prep, and no pressurized cans to open.

Also, the directions tell you how to prepare your dough in a food processor (my Ninja mini food processor was barely big enough for a single batch). Pushing a button to cut the shortening into the flour was so much easier, in my opinion, than cutting it in with my pastry cutter. 

Once rolled and cut, I baked half of the biscuits right away and froze the other half.  Once fully frozen, I baked them up according to the recipe's baking-without-thawing instructions.

Whether baked right away or frozen first, these biscuits came out the same (which I find very good to know).  They turned out light and fluffy, and tasted just like the small can refrigerator biscuits that you pick up for about $0.50 to $0.75 a can.  The kind of stuff best reserved for Monkey Bread (aka Cinnamon Pull Apart Bread) or Semi-homemade Donuts. 

I'm thrilled to know how to use my food processor to make prepping my dough easier and I'm excited to freeze ready-to-bake biscuits in the future.  Now, all I have to do is find a biscuit recipe that I love.