hi I'm Michelle Karim with dishes by Michelle in Los Angeles California one side dish that you are sure to find on just about every single Christmas holiday table this year is mashed potatoes well you don't want to serve your guests just any mashed potatoes and these happen to be my favorite once a year red rustic mashed potatoes so you could probably make these mashed potatoes just about all year round but I like to kid my family and say they're real special and I make them just one time a year and probably because I use red russet potatoes now normally when I use these I peel these potatoes but what makes these rustic is that I leave the skin on and I don't tell them this secret but it's fairly easy to make so it's really basic and I have some water going over here and I'm just going to go ahead and start quartering my potatoes now you want to try to use potatoes that are all just about the same size that when you quarter them they all cook at about the same time as I go I'm just gonna throw them into my water I've also washed these potatoes before I've put them in to make sure that I remove any excess dirt since we are not removing the skin and these potatoes will probably take anywhere from about you know 15 to 20 minutes to cook and you don't want to put it on a super high boil you want to make sure that it kind of stays in a medium simmer because you don't want the potatoes to break and fall apart inside of there so I've drained my potatoes and the next thing I'm going to do is just go ahead and mash them get in all and already just like this they're pretty great on their own but now we're gonna make them even better so they're all mashed now and we're just going to add our butter and I just have half a stick of butter over here now don't freak out about the butter because it's just one time of year that I make this so we're going to just go ahead and kind of cover it a little bit with the potatoes so that it goes on in there and melts and then I'm going to add about a quarter of a cup of heavy cream and I have about two tablespoons of sour cream I've got just a little bit of white pepper I don't like to use black pepper in my mashed potatoes because who wants to see a little black flecks I use white pepper and it's also got a a bit more of a subtle taste of the pepper to it it's not as overwhelming so I'm just gonna put just a tiny bit of black pepper white pepper and then I have just a little bit of salt and let's give this a quick mix and these potatoes are just so fantastic because they're creamy the sour cream actually really adds some more depth to the potatoes the whipped cream really keeps it even more creamy than it already is the skin on just adds that real earthy flavor to it now there are so many things you could do to these potatoes from this step alone I my family we like them just like this and this is probably how we would eat them but you could go ahead and roast some garlic or you should you could get some fresh rosemary from your garden or you could maybe get some smoked gouda or some smoked cheddar cheese and you can put it on top of there and let it melt on top these potatoes can go from a plain ordinary side dish to the star on your table in a matter of seconds by just adding a few more simple ingredients so one of my favorite things about this dish is that there's not a whole lot to it it's potatoes and who knew that potatoes could be so versatile and who knew that you could make mashed potatoes without all that fuss and muss of getting out a blender a mixer and all those things this dish just required a little bit of arm muscle and potato has gone from zero to hero in about a second I'm Michele crammed with dishes by Michelle thank you so much for watching my recipe on rustic mashed potatoes so good