They look like dowdy dirt-kickers, but potatoes are really very princessy things. They need a lot of TLC. They need a lot of time. After eyeballing my sale 5-lb bag of potatoes for the week after its purchase, I finally decided to just cook them all at once. I didn't want to deal with careful treatment of any kind or hover over them while they took various long trips to deliciousness. I scrubbed them, cubed them, boiled them, then mashed them in the pot with a spoon, along with a bit of butter and sour cream I had in the fridge. Just to get them kind of to the next rudimentary potato state. They were russets, though, so the skins...ungh. A horrible failure. A very nasty thing to pick out, over and over.

So, I decided to rice these previously mashed potatoes to remove the skins. And it worked, after a fashion, although I did lose some potato in the process. The funniest part turned out to be that the additional presence and placement of the skins in the ricer created a lot of pressure in the hopper and made for a very Silly String-like experience. Filaments of mashed potato shot in random bursts all the way across the kitchen and ended up on my shirt/wall/condiments (as in this photo). I did save the mash, and I guess it was less onerous than peeling all five pounds, but oigh. It's always something with potatoes.