Green Garlic Mashed Potatoes

Elevate your mashed potatoes with the sweet earthiness of green garlic for a flavourful version that’s velvety smooth and unique; it works great as a side with meat/fish mains or as stuffing in parathas and sandwiches.

Winters mean a variety of greens and brown-paper bags filled with crisp greens, especially green garlic and spring onion. The spring onion bulbs often find their way as a salad on our lunch plates. Just chop off the bulbs and munch on with your rice-curry or roti-sabji. But the winter-special green garlic is often used as a replacement to garlic cloves and garlic flakes and to flavour pasta, soups and in this case, the erstwhile aloo sheddo or mashed potato! 

The inspiration for this version of the mashed potato comes from my September meals – the time when I was struggling with a horrible bout of chikungunya, could barely eat due to lack of taste (no, it wasn’t Covid-19, thankfully!), and the joints were swollen and painful. One of the most popular home remedies to hasten recovery was the copious consumption of garlic. Which meant my mother was adding triple the amount of garlic in everything, including aloo sheddo, the Bengali term for mashed potatoes where aloo=potato and sheddo=boiled.

Come January, and the fragrant, sweetly pungent, green garlic seemed like a great alternative to the regular garlic. So out came the butter (what’s mashed without butter!), the green garlic and tadaaaaa! A new recipe was added to the list of winter staples in the Bhaumick household.

THINGS TO REMEMBER WHEN MAKING GREEN GARLIC MASHED POTATOES

The Mashed Potatoes with Green Garlic OR Green Garlic Mashed Potatoes is a versatile dish that tastes amazing on its own AND can be used as a stuffing. We’ve had it with boiled rice, used it to make breakfast sandwiches and had a dinner of parathas stuffed with this mix. And they taste ah-mazing! 

• Make sure you wash the green garlic well so that there’s no mud or dust in your mashed
• Use all of the green garlic – the bulb and the green stalk
• The amount of green garlic can be adjusted depending on the pungency of the greens and your taste
• Notch up the taste factor with a dash of chilli flakes if you feel like it

And that’s about that! If you’re looking for other winter specials, I’d suggest you check out the recipe for the Slow-Cooked Mixed Vegetables, the Carrot & Coconut Halva, the Carrot & Date Rolls and of course, the Carrot Kheer for those special weekends.

If you make this recipe at home, do let me know in the comments below. And don’t forget to tag me on Instagram – the handle is from.the.corner.table.