Kitchen Tips : Makeshift Potato Masher

For most of you home cooks out there, there’s probably one kitchen tool that you can’t or wouldn’t want to live without.  There are so many fancy electronic kitchen gadgets available now, I wanted find out from our kitchen team their preferred simple tool.

For Claire, it's the vegetable peeler.  Heather chose the rasp and Miranda is pretty keen on her heatproof spatula.  For myself, I don't think I could live without my whisk.  I believe it's one of the most basic, but multi-purpose, tools in my home kitchen.  It can whip, beat, mix and sift the lazy man's way (ie. running your whisk through flour a couple times to remove lumps).

During Friendsgiving this past weekend, I witnessed yet another application for the whisk: potato masher!  As I watched my friend, Marisa, mash the potatoes with her whisk, it dawned on me how genius it was and how I’ve been much too reliant on fancy potato mashers and immersion blenders to do the job.  Just use a nice, sturdy whisk the same way as you would a masher, and the result is a creamy, fluffy heap of mashed potatoes.  So the next time you find yourself in a kitchen with just the bare minimum tools, use your imagination - you might just be able to re-purpose some old tools!

-Irene