i love me some potatoes

Last night, I had a flashback to the claggy boiled potatoes of my childhood.  No offense intended to my Mum or Dad, those spuds were great, I loved them.  We'd cut them open and add salt and pepper, mashing them slightly with a fork.  As I ate my lightly mashed potatoes yesterday, I thought 'self, you don't actually have to add half a pound of butter to mashed potatoes to make them taste fine. Yes, a lump of butter the size of a fist and whipping them with a fork post mashing would make them taste amazing.  But it's not necessary every damn time you eat them.  Your arteries and ass will thank you later.'

The issue is, you see, my husband is a doodie.

(I'll give you a minute - read that link.)

(With me now?)

Every time I suggest to P he might like to scale it back a bit and that every meal doesn't have to be a production, he responds with some variation on "why are you against deliciousness?"

He's got a valid point, I suppose - why not strive to make everything taste as good as possible?  However, he wants to eat steak and thrice cooked chips more often than I want to consume the level of canola oil used in the cooking. 

(Also - how privileged are we, for goodness' sake?  It was a full-fledged crisis in our house last week when the caterpillars had eaten all the parsley, the creepy little fuckers.)

He's not averse to healthy eating. The only qualification is that it must be tasty and it seems to me that there is a direct correllation between the quantity of organic extra virgin olive oil (pressed by uncle and aunt from their grove, no less, at a community press) and tastiness. 

Even better, he loves a recipe that involves copious amounts of chopping, as slicing things is his favourite activity (*ahem*, marital relations excluded) (I hope) since he bought the Japanese handbeaten knife as a promotion present for himself in 2011.  The chopping, sorry, precision dicing/slicing/brunoising or whatever, is OK with me.  Or at least, it is now after we threw away the mandolin following the great thumb slicing of 2013).

He hasn't bought a sous vide, though.  Yet.