As part of the life of a nachonomist I spend a lot of time eating chips. Sometimes though, and it may be blasphemous to say it, I don’t want to eat chips. Sometimes I want to eat potatoes, and there’s no better way to have potatoes in my opinion than reconstituted from dust from out of a bag. Fortunately the good people at Idahoan have made a product with me in mind: Fully Loaded Nacho Cheese Mashed Potatoes.

It is truly quite a magic trick to watch a packet full of dust mixed into boiling water supernaturally turn into mashed potatoes. My great grandmother would probably have flashed the sign of the evil eye and spat through it before allowing such devilment to infest her kitchen, but I am accustomed to modern culinary witchcraft and have eaten such a thing before. In this busy work a day world who has the time to slice up potatoes, boil them until soft, and then mash them into mashed potatoes? Not I, that is for sure, hence employing such alchemy. This easy way to make them can result in your potatoes having an interestingly congealed consistency, which these certainly had in spades, in addition to the unnatural color associated with all things containing the “nacho” adjective. These potatoes certainly did not reinvent any wheels in the “nacho” world

At first taste, these are potatoes, and personally with potatoes you want more to them than just the potato itself; butter, sour cream, chives, bacon bits, cheese, etc. These certainly do not have any of that. What they do have, the second flavor that hits you, is good ol’ nacho cheese, in this case the same kind that you can find at a popcorn station of a movie theater to sprinkle over your snack. There are many varieties of fake nacho cheese out there, some more potent than others, some funkier tasting, and some just meh, and whatever they used in here was just plain meh. Yes, it has a spicy cheese flavor kind of, so you have met the bare essentials for calling it “nacho cheese”, but the bare essentials are all you have met. Also, having looked at the expiration date and seen that their best before date was a month before now I wondered if that might be having an effect on them, but I have to assume that that is pretty unlikely.

So you have some so-so potatoes, what are you going to do about that? If you were some kind of gross food waster you could just toss them in the garbage, but don’t be a gross food waster. Maybe if you served them as a side with some other meal as I’m sure they are intended to be eaten that’ll spread out the flavor in the way that just eating them out of a bowl by yourself does not. If you are however going to sit down and consume 4 servings of nacho cheese mashed potatoes resulting in 3,120 mgs of Sodium, maybe you want to really nacho it up some. Treat the potatoes as a really mashed up bunch of chips and cheese, so if you add some lettuce, jalapenos, sour cream and salsa, you’re beginning to really nachoify it. You totally won’t offset the 132% of your daily sodium allowance, but you can pretend the vegetables are helping out some. Sadly, adding some other stuff to help these out is as good you you’re going to get with these.