Life lesson: Don’t start making a brand-new recipe at 8:41 PM the night before a deadline.
SMASHED TOPATOES & CHACKEN WINGS
By: Kyle Decker
Kyle
For dinner, it has chackin wings. It has putza on the ritz, and then it has salat.Tom
What about—do they serve smashed topatoes?Kyle
They do serve smashed topatoes.Tom
[Triumphant.] Yes!Kyle
But you're gonna have to rush to get to it.Tom
I will.Kyle
Xoc just farsteps on top of the smashed topa--.[Laughter from the party.]
Tom
Actually, yeah. Yeah, I'll just far step to the front of the line for that.
The Prodigious - the location of the above quotes - is all about the intersection of efficiency and luxury. So, a high-end version of chicken wings and mashed potatoes felt appropriate.
Let’s start with the smashed topatoes. As much as I’d love to take a hammer to some potatoes, I chose to go a bit simpler this time around and add some sun-dried tomatoes to a mashed potato recipe. I followed this recipe to the letter, meaning that I largely just made up the amount of spices as I went along.
Emily then peeled some potatoes, I chopped them up, threw them in a lot of water and WAY too much butter. Add some air-fried tomatoes and a healthy amount of salt garnish, and you have some pretty decent piles of butter potatoes!
Then came the star of tonight’s disaster: the chacken wings.
I had two angles I wanted to take with this. The first was to make imitation chicken wings, using the oven version of this recipe (since the air fryer was busy with the tomatoes). I admit, I was a bit worried with how long this would take to cook, but waiting so long to make this recipe shouldn’t have any other consequences.
Oh.
Oh no.
Well, the good news was that this recipe got a lot simpler! The bad news was that I had to go to Burger King.
After retrieving three bags of nuggets and a milkshake each for Emily and myself, it was time to get to work.
The second angle I had wanted to take with the chacken wings was to imitate blackened chicken (because they both have the ack, you see). So, I figured I’d replace the buffalo sauce with some store-bought Cajun sauce for Emily and parmesan herb sauce for my spice-avoidant tummy.
I marinated the nuggets, threw them in the broiler for 3 minutes, took a bite, and…
They were fine. Definitely better than I feared, but definitely worse than they would have been had I not drank an entire milkshake half an hour earlier.
Smashed Topatoes
Prep Time: 15 Min
Cook Time: 30 Min
Ingredients
Sun-Dried Tomatoes
A bag of grape tomatoes
Olive oil
Thyme
Oregano
Parsley
Smashed Topatoes
A bag of potatoes
A lot of butter
Directions
Cut the tomatoes in half and put as much thyme, oregano, and parsley on them as you’d like, as well as some salt and pepper.
Cover in olive oil.
Set skin-down on an air fryer in a single layer.
Cook at 240°F (120°C) for 20 minutes.
Shake the basket
Cook at 240°F (120°C) for 10 minutes.
Repeat steps 5 & 6 two more times (50 minutes of cooking total).
Turn the tomatoes over and cook at 240°F (120°C) for 15 minutes.
Peel and cut up the potatoes into small chunks.
Boil for about 15-20 minutes, until the potatoes can be easily squished with a fork.
Drain and return to the pot.
Add butter and mix into the potatoes under low heat.
Take the butter/potato mix off of the heat.
Mash the potatoes with a fork
Add the sun-dried tomatoes and some salt
Enjoy!
Chacken Wings
Prep Time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 3 minutes
Ingredients
Chicken nuggets
Sauce
Directions
Come up with a really ambitious recipe
Wait long enough that your ingredients go bad
Buy pre-made chicken nuggets
Slap on some sauce
Heat it up in the microwave, air fryer, oven, hood of your car on a hot summer’s day, etc.
Enjoy?