In preparation for pastry experiments

I have been asked to give tips on gluten free pastry. My current favourite pastry recipe is one that contains mashed potatoes. I have used it before. So yesterday I made mashed potatoes for dinner and deliberately made too much.

As I don't eat dairy my mashed potatoes have neither milk, cream nor butter in them. I peel potatoes and cut them in pieces, then boil in lightly salted water until soft. I then pour off most of the water, but not all, add more salt, pepper, some grated nutmeg and a lot of olive oil. I then ask the tolerant one to help me mash.

[Help. You ask me to HELP you mash? Not the way I see it. What you get me to do is all the work.]

I get you to do all the work? Yes of course, the mashing is the main part of making a dinner, of course it is.

Anyway... I always make way too much mashed potato so the leftovers were not just used for pastry but also for lunch. We have a family recipe for potato patties, that originated with my grandmother who apparently refused to eat anything else at Christmas. The original recipe calls for breadcrumbs, which isn't any good for the gluten intolerants amongst us. So for lunch today I mixed the following.

1 cup cold mashed potatoes
2 eggs
4 tbsp gram flour
salt and pepper.
Warm oil in a frying pan and spoon in the potato mixture. Fry on both sides until golden brown.

I also made almond milk. Recipes for nutmilk can be found in this post. However for ease of refence, I soaked 1 cup of almonds over night and then strained. The next day I added 3 cups of water, 3 dates and a pinch of salt and let it run in the food processor for quite some time. I strained it through a muslin cloth and ended up with about 125 grams of almond paste afterwards. This I kept for a pastry to be used in a dessert.