My "Great American Potato Salad" Odyssey

On Thursday evening, I decided to make potato salad. I've been wanting to for the longest time. I love potato salad and my love for it knows no bounds. The last time I cooked a potato salad was 2 years ago with a different recipe. I like to go two years in between cooking something. That's just my style.

Kraft's version of the salad

I saw a recipe in Kraft’s Food Magazine, keep it, and promised myself that I would try it out. Here's why I don't cook that often. Often, when I would want to cook something, it always turns out that I’m missing some ingredients that I need. I'm not really a planner. I just decided after awhile, that I was tired of waiting to cook the potato salad, and I really wanted to try the recipe, so I just went ahead and did it. I knew that we had potatoes and mayo and eggs, and those where the main ingredients, so I was off. But the frustrating thing is that because I lack several ingredients, I always try to substitute one ingredient for a similar kind, but you know how that turns out. (Not Good).

I got my recipe sheet and started hunting for the ingredients. I found that I had mayo, mustard, salt, pepper -- the top part was good, but bottom part was the problem. I didn't have celery seed, celery or dill pickle relish. Actually, I'm not sure what the last one actually is, but I did have some dill pickles, but I decided not to use it. I'm not a big fan of pickles.

Now the real cooking starts at a frenzied pace. I got the potatoes cleaned, cut, and put into pot for boiling. Did the same for the eggs. I'm not really sure how long you're supposed to cook potatoes or eggs. Anyways, I was just basically winging it from the beginning.

mayo, mustard, seasoning

Then I got to the nitty gritty part of the recipe. The little stuff that happens in between the real cooking. I had to "mix mayo, mustard, and seasonings in large bowl." Nothing ever goes as smoothly as the recipes, and my cooking style would affirm that. I cook really messy, but I'm content with that -- I reason that as long as I get to eat the dish at the end of it, then no problem. It took me several steps to do what one simple sentence told me to do, but I managed.

the eggs are done

Somewhere in all of that, I also cut the onions and added it to the mix of mayo, mustard, and seasoning. After wondering for the fifth or sixth whether the potatoes were cooked or not, (I did the same thing with the egg), I decided to take my chances and hoped that they were cooked enough. Soon after, my fingers were red and bruised from having to peel skins off hot potatoes, which got me thinking that maybe I should have peeled the skin off before I cooked the potatoes. Is there any procedure for that? Peeling the egg skin wasn't so bad because my fingers were used to the pain by then.

My potato salad

Now comes the fun part. Mixing all the ingredients together in the "large bowl" the instructions pointed out. After putting the potatoes in there, I decided that the dish needs some color because I didn't have celery. So what's the next best thing from celery? Carrots. Baby Carrots.

And with a splash of baby carrots on top of my Great American Potato Salad, I was done. It came out all right. However, note the difference in appearance of Kraft's potato salad to how mine came out. Anyhow, my salad was edible, so to me, it meant that it turned out to be successful.