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.