At my house, no Thanksgiving dinner
is complete without mathed potatoes.
To make mathed potatoes, start by boiling the potatoes
until they're soft, which will take about 15 to 20 minutes.
After you drain them and let them cool slightly,
you're ready for the math.
Take one potato and divide evenly
to get half a potato, plus half a potato.
Then divide the halves into fourths and the fourths
into eights and so on.
Eventually, you will have a completely mathed potato
that looks like this.
Once you have proven this result for one potato,
you can apply it to other potatoes
without going through the entire process.
That's how math works.
While I prefer refined and precise methods
for mathing a potato, many people
just apply brute force algorithms.
You can also add other variables like butter, cream, garlic,
salt, and pepper.
Place in a hemisphere and garnish
with an organic hyperbolic plane,
and your math potatoes are ready for the table.
Together with a cranberry cylinder and a nice basket
of bread spheres with butter prism,
you'll be well on your way to creating
a delicious and engaging Thanksgiving meal.
Here's a serving tip.
When arranging mathed potatoes on your plate,
it is important to do it in a way that holds gravy.
If you just make a mound, the gravy will fall off.
It's best to create some kind of trough or pool.
But what shape will maximize the amount of gravy it can hold?
Due to the structural properties of mathed potatoes,
this can essentially be reduced to a two-dimensional gravy pool
problem, where you want the most gravy
area given a certain potato perimeter.
When I think of this question, I like
to think about inflating shapes.
Say you inflated a triangle.
It would add more area and round out into a circle.
And then, if the perimeter can't change, it would pop.
In fact, all 2D shapes inflate into circles.
And in 3D, it's spheres, which is my bubbles like to be round.
And turkeys are spheroid, because that
optimizes for maximum stuffing.
The limited three-dimensional capacity of mathed potatoes
may confuse things a little.
But since a mathed potato sphere can't support itself,
you're really stuck with extrusions of 2D shapes.
So what's better?
A deep mathed potato cylinder or a shallow but wider one?
Well, think of it like this.
If you slice the deep version in half,
you'll see it has equivalent gravy-holding capacity to two
separate shallow cylinders.
And the perimeter of two circles would
be more efficient if combined into one bigger circle.
So the solution is to create the biggest, roundest,
shallowest gravy pool you can.
In fact, maybe you should just skip the mathed potatoes
and get a bowl.
Anyway, I hope this simple recipe
helps you have an optimal Thanksgiving experience.
Advanced chef-amaticians may wish
to try Banach-Tarski potatoes, wherein
after you cut a potato in a particular way,
you put the pieces back together and get two potatoes.
Stay tuned for more delicious and extremely practical
Thanksgiving recipes this week.