When I put the kids to bed, I often fall asleep myself after reading to them and snuggling. This happened again a few days ago, and when I woke up, I had an incomprehensible desire to make mashed potatoes with peanut butter. I figured it had to have been tried before, but came up snake eyes after I fired up the internet and found surprisingly few actual recipes, apart from mentions of it having been tried on Top Chef. My wife thought I was crazy — I am — and that it sounded disgusting. Undaunted, today I gave it a try. I used instant mashed potatoes because it was lunchtime and I was lazy, adding about two tablespoons of organic peanut butter to the milk (for what the potato mix says is for “6 servings,” which is just about the right amount for one me-sized serving.). After the water, salt and butter boiled, I added the instant flakes and then the PB-laced milk and began stirring. It actually mixed fairly easily.

I often make for lunch what I call “mashed potato surprise,” where I also add bacon, cheese and whatever else we happen to have in the refrigerator, like vegetables, or something similar (that’s the surprise part). It’s a quick and filling lunch. I decided that the peanut butter mashed potatoes would benefit from having bacon, too, and then I also added some shredded cheese just because. The bacon and peanut butter was awesome together and the cheese, while not standing out, didn’t get in the way either. It was actually much better than I expected and I’ll definitely be adding this to my lunchtime menu. Oh, and I paired it with with a hoppy Blind Pig IPA, from Russian River, which I have to say, worked pretty well..

You can’t see it very well in the photo, but the normally snow white mashed potatoes are dulled a bit from the brown peanut butter. The lumps are the bacon bits.