If people give you all kinds of cooking stuff on December 25, maybe you should think about doing some actual cooking on December 26. I wasn't quite up to that today, though. I was up to much of anything, in fact. I woke up tired and stayed that way all day. As hard as I tried to get some work done, I think I'll be putting in more than the usual amount of time over the weekend.

However, I did get around on my errands, the usual ones plus a stop by Suzanne's house to see her, and Mom's house to see her, and the supermarket to stock up on whatever I thought I might need. Unfortunately, I was too tired to decide before I left what I would want to cook, so I just sort of wandered through the produce department.

The one thing I knew I needed was potatoes, because that's what I know how to fix without mangling too badly. I got some yellow ones this time, and a few russets for baking. Thank goodness there's something that keeps more than a day or two, because I've had to throw out some perfectly good herbs that I just never figured out how to use.

But I knew one more thing I wanted, because Rachael Ray uses it all the time, and that's Italian flat-leaf parsley. It's inexpensive and much easier to chop than the other kind with the leafy florets.

It's probably just as well I didn't bring home very much, because by the time the dinner hour arrived tonight, I didn't feel like doing a lot of work in the kitchen. That's unusual for me lately, because it's where I've been going to relax and unwind at the end of the day. Not today, though. All I wanted to do was sit.

Still, I had this new potato masher and all these potatoes. And I figure that if you've mentioned you don't have a potato masher, and that's the reason you've never fixed mashed potatoes, and then somebody gives you one, there's a sort of obligation involved.

It's actually quite easy, isn't it? And it doesn't take many ingredients. You'd think I might have left it at that, since this was my first time, but no. I had to complicate things. I chopped up some of that Italian parsley, and I also sautéed a couple of cloves of garlic in butter. Just for fun. Just because once I did get out of my chair and into the kitchen, I felt better and more energized than I had all day.

So I had garlic-and-parsley mashed potatoes tonight, with my (sorry) store-bought cold fried chicken. Well, you can't do it all at once. At least, I can't. Maybe someday I'll figure out how to cook more than one thing at a time, but I'm not there yet. That's why I'm so grateful for leftovers (which often turn out better than they were the first day anyway).

Tomorrow? I don't know. Maybe I'll look through my new cookbook later on and see if I need to make another trip to the store to get something to go with my leftover mashed potatoes. That sounds like a good plan.

Oh, and by the way, the mashed potatoes turned out quite nicely, thank you. They were fully mashed and had just the right amount of flavor and texture. It was an experiment, and most of my cooking experiments have been failures the first time out (don't even ask about my meatloaf), but apparently either mashed potatoes are very easy or I just got very lucky.