Because I am relatively new to things in the kitchen that are not pre-packaged, I am also new to the terminology that comes with cooking things the right way.

Today's lesson for me was par-boiled potatoes. Par-boiled potatoes should be boiled anywhere from 5-15 minutes (I found a wide variety of opinions from both my online sources and my sources that I could speak to directly.) The idea behind par-boiled potatoes is to give your potatoes that extra-magical jump-start they need to cook for delicacies such as hash browns and more.

Like any potatoes, par-boiled potatoes should be cooked longer if they are whole, and less if they are cut into chunks or french-fry-like strips of potatoes.

Lest you wonder, par-boiling is not for potatoes only. You can par-boil other vegetables before freezing them, or you can par-boil tomatoes in order to get the skins off of them easily. According to this overly-informative site on parboiling, some rice producers even parboil rice at the time of harvest which makes the rice taste better in theory.

The experts claim that the danger of par-boiling is that your potatoes can get too mushy- as anyone who has ever eaten mushy fried potatoes knows, there is nothing worse. As my on-hand expert states: the key is managing the thickness of your cuts of potato if you are not par-boiling whole entire potatoes. Small potato wedges can be cooked for under five minutes- or enough to drive a fork through the potato with medium resistance. (Why anyone would want to attack a poor, defenseless potato is beyond me, of course...)

At this point in the par-boiling debate, I must confess that my par-boiling duties were limited to peeling the potatoes with my super-duper peeler from Asia and cutting the potatoes into small wedges, so I can't necessarily say how mushy potatoes get if over-cooked. Given my past record with kitchen mayhem and mishaps, I am sure that I would over-boil the potatoes into a mushy glob and ruin any chances for success in either roasting the potatoes or in frying them.

And, as an aside to the parboiling topic in general, if you are trying to impress your foodie friends with the word "par-boiling", it won't work- trust me, they probably learned it from their parents in elementary school.