I have a very large extended family, so for years, we’d have at least 75-100 people at every holiday meal. Each smaller family unit was put in charge of a specific dish to bring, and for decades, mine has been assigned the task of making all the mashed potatoes.
Potato dishes are easily some of the best sides at Thanksgiving or Easter, but peeling more than a few spuds at a time, bent over the sink, can be really, really hard on hands, wrists and backs. My mom would rope all four of us kids into helping, and we’d form an extremely reluctant and sour-faced little potato assembly line with our vegetable peelers and go through bags and bags of potatoes — that is, when she could get us to help at all.
We all pretty much hated Thanksgiving and other big holiday mornings until I discovered the Starfit Rotato Express and bought one for my parents’ house.