Potato Salad Three Ways

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As a kid I would never touch potato salad or anything potato-y except French fries and potato chips.  When I lived in Houston as an undergrad at Rice University, there was a fabulous Jewish deli in “the village,” a cute shopping area not far from campus.  Alfred’s was a small town girl’s indoctrination into matzo balls, kreplach, and sardine platters to say nothing of the delicious meats like pastrami, especially, piled high on the rye bread for a stunning sandwich.  I discovered olives that didn’t come in a can.  The potato salad always came on the plate with a sandwich.  When you’re away from home, you’re more likely to try foods that you would never touch with a ten-foot pole at home under  your Mom’s gaze.  I tried the potato salad.  Tasted good!  Who knew?  Alfred’s had a roast chicken with the stuffing under the skin that was totally to die for. 

Once the cultural barrier was broken, I ate Chinese, Mexican, Indian and Middle Eastern.   French, too!  It was four years of culinary adventure as well as academic learning.   I don’t recall the details from many of the courses I took, but I sure remember the food.

Here are three potato salad recipes.  The first is from my mother-in-law, a German woman from Silesia, now Poland.  I know the ingredients sound a little weird, but the whole is way better than the sum of its parts.  It’s great with bratwurst and grilled German treats. 

Omi’s Silesian Kartoffel Salat:

3 lbs. potatoes

1/1 lb. mayo

¼ lb cold cuts, diced.  We always used bologna

2 dill pickles, diced

2 apples, diced

1 medium onion, diced

3 Tablespoons capers,

½ cup of vinegar or pickle juice

1/8 lb. cooked bacon with fat

salt and pepper to taste

Mix everything together.  I prefer potato salad chilled.  Great for a party. 

Another German potato salad, this one from the late, lamented German restaurant in New York City, Luchow’s.

Note: no mayonnaise! 

Luchow’s Potato Salad

2 lbs. potatoes

½ c. beef stock or bouillion

½ cup onion, minced

 6 Tablespoons wine vinegar (red)

6 Tablespoons canola or peanut oil

1 teaspoons salt

½ teaspoon freshly ground black peppr

1 egg yok. 

Wash and scrub potatoes; boil in jackets until tender.  Let cool until they can be handled.  Peel and slice thinly.  Pour stock over to be absorbed by the potatoes; add onion.  Mix remaining ingredients; beat smoothly together and pour over the potatoes.  Garnish with finely chopped parsely.  Serve warm or chilled.  Serves 4.

Potato and Pea Salad with Chive Aioli  (from July 2001, Gourmet)

8 servings

3 lbs. small red-skinned new potatoes,

unpeeled

3 T. white wine vinegar

3 celery stalks, thinly sliced

1 ½ cups frozen green peas, thawed

1 c. mayonnaise

6 T. chopped fresh chives

1 T. Dijon mustard

2 garlic cloves, pressed

¼ t. cayenne pepper

Cook potatoes in large pot of boiling,

salted water until just tender, about

25 minutes.  Drain.  Cool.  Cut potatoes

into quarters.  Transfer to large bowl;

add vinegar and toss to coat.  Mix in

celery and peas.

Whisk Mayonnaise, 5 T. chives, mustard,

Garlic and cayenne pepper in a small bowl

to blend.  Add to potato mixture and toss.

Season generously with salt and pepper.

Cover and chill at least one hour to allow

flavors to blend.  Sprinkle with remaining

1 T. chives and serve.

The garlic and cayenne give this an intriguing little kick

These recipes would be great to take to a potluck.  Most people like potato salad, excepting my pre-eighteen-year-old self.  Note the ingredients do not break the bank.  Cheap, if fact.  How can you lose?  Email me if you like them!  

The Cheeseparer  with OldBroad blogging today. 

Classic Gazpacho from Gourmet - 1964

I suppose this recipe can be considered "vintage."  It must have come from the first Gourmet I ever encountered.   I've been making it since the early days of marriage, or at least since a blender entered our happy home.  Assume a food processor would work this as well. 

This is a great recipe for August, when the garden is bursting with cukes, tomatoes, and parsley.  Maybe you grow peppers, too, in which case you almost have a free meal. 

Gazpacho

In the container of a blender, combine 5 very ripe tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped, 1 cucumber, peeled and chopped, 1 green (or red, orange or yellow) pepper, seeded and chopped, 1 onion, chopped, 1 tablespoon finely chopped parsley, and 1 garlic clove, crushed.

Cover the container and blend the mixture until it is almost smooth. Stir in 1 1/4 cups tomatoes juice, 3 T. olive oil, 1 T. vinegar, 1/4 t. paprika, and salt and pepper to taste.  Chill the soup thoroughly.

Serve the gazpacho in individual, chilled soup bowls.  You may serve diced tomato, peppers, cukes, etc. all peeled and seeded as above.  Homemade croutons are also a nice accompaniment.

Last fall when we were in Spain we ate Gazpacho for lunch every day and never encountered the same recipe twice.  Always different, always good.  And we didn't gain any weight due to the light lunch and all the walking.  Seville's was best in my opinion.

We're serving a thin-sliced Polish ham with ripe melon (99 cents at our supermarket) and eggplant salad.  It's easy to eat healthy in the summer.

Bon Appetit! 

The Cheeseparer

Photos to follow!

Going Bananas

We were gifted probably the world's worst banana bread this week, and I fed it to the little herd of Scottish Highland Cattle who are very big on that kind of food.  This banana bread looked all right, but it had no taste of bananas, it was dry, and there were weird "off" flavors of cinnamon and who-knows-what.

People, banana bread is a slam-dunk, and I am here to provide you the World's Best Recipe, bar none, and probably the world's simplest.  The recipe was given to me years ago when I had a baby and we lived in an apartment in Elk Grove Village, Illinois.  Right under the O'hare Airport instrument runway and across from United Airlines Flight Attendant Training Facility.  The Elk and their grove were down the road and there was a pump where you could fill you own water bottles

  Nita’s Banana Bread

1 cup sugar
½ cup (1 stick) butter, softened
pinch salt
2 eggs, beaten
3 ripe mashed bananas
3 Tablespoons sour milk, buttermilk, plain yogurt or sour cream
1 teaspoon baking soda
2 cups white flour

Cream butter, add sugar, mix well and add bananas.  Mix salt, flour and baking soda and add to banana mixture alternating with sour milk.  Mix together lightly.  Pour into a 9 x 5  inch greased loaf pan.  (Non stick is great!)
Bake in slowish (325 degrees Fahrenheit) for 45-60 minutes, until tested inserted in middle comes out clean.   Cool on rack and remove bread from pan.  Eat and enjoy.
A handful of blueberries or raisins may be added after dry ingredients.


Please don't do anything dumb like substitute margarine or oil  for butter or only use 2 instead of 3 bananas, or you will not longer be baking the world's best, and in fact you may be baking the world's most ordinary.  Just a friendly word of caution.  And for God's sake, don't substitute applesauce for the butter or anything culinarily criminal like that.  Or we can no longer be friends.

The Cheeseparer

Wardrobe Malfuctions

This is not what you think.  All season long I have been considering (and reconsidering) buying a black jacket, because my old one is looking a bit shabby.  Thinking maybe I would try the new resale shop in town.

Last Saturday morning I woke up with the sudden knowledge that I bought a nice black jacket last year.  How, I don't know, but I'd forgotten it.  We had a busy, hectic, not to say traumatic spring this year, and well, I forgot.  Not in the bedroom closet, nor in the guest room closet, but hanging there in the cedar closet, in a dry cleaner's bag with my favorite skirt that I had also forgotten. Wore both to the MFA to the Alex Katz show, feeling very elegant.   


Normally, it would have been in the guest closet, because neither of the fabrics were wool, hence they didn't need to be in the cedar closet.  This morning, I woke up trying too remember when my grandmother had died.  1963.  How could I forget?  A stressed mind plays tricks on you.  I'm unstressing and hence, remembering stuff. 


In the days of yore, I kept an inventory by season of summer and winter clothes, with the age and condition of each garment.  When I stopped working, I no longer kept the inventory.  Now I'm thinking maybe it should be revived.  The nice thing about this is that you can cast you eye over what you have and the age and condition, and make some fill-in purchases.  No doing what I did this year and buying a new top for really old pants.  


There are many ways to be frugal, and clothes come right behind groceries.  Recently I have discovered The Sports Authority which has name brands of sportswear at good prices.   The chain had always flown under my radar.   Ocean State Job Lot always has good "lounge pants" at  $ 5 - $6.  Add a Walmart Faded Glory T-shirt for $5 and you have yourself a great set of pajamas for $10.00.  


Frugally yours, 


the Cheeseparer

Pesto Alla Genovese

Pesto alla Genovese

2 cups fresh basil leaves, stripped from their stems, coarsely chopped and tightly packed. 

1 t. salt

½ t. freshly ground black pepper

1-2 t. finely chopped garlic

2 T. finely chopped pine nuts (or walnuts)

1 to 1 1/2 cups olive oil

½ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

In a blender or food processer, combine basil, salt, pepper, garlic, nuts and 1 cup of olive oil.  Blend at high speed until the ingredients are smooth, stopping every 5 or 6 second to push herbs down with a rubber spatula.

The sauce should be thin enough to run off the spatula easily.  If too thick, blend in as much as ½ cup more olive oil.

Transfer the sauce to a bowl and stir in the grated cheese.

Poach chicken breasts, cool and cut into bit size pieces.  Add a few spoons of pesto and mix well.  Serve on lettuce or as part of an antipasto. 

You can also mix the chicken and pesto with cooled pasta and fresh tomatoes for a delicious main course.  Serve with French bread.

The Garden Brings Forth Food

Yes!  Finally ripe tomatoes, cukes, loads of herbs.  I made pesto Genovese today.  Last night I poached a large chicken breast.   Used part of the pesto to toss with bite-sized pieces of chicken, and cooked a pound of pasta, small-ziti type, and chopped up 3 ripe tomatoes.  After draining and cooling the pasta, I added the chicken with pesto and the tomatoes.  This is a yummy cheap (this time of  year) meal.  Chicken breasts are always on sale, and the basil was from the garden.  I grated an ancient piece of Romano cheese on my microplane.  Used walnuts instead of pine nuts.    Great taste.  The pesto makes the chicken so flavorful.  We also had a green salad with romaine, cukes and avocado, all on sale.  Photo tomorrow.   This would serve six.  

Tomorrow I'm making a sponge cake that is then cut into pieces, frosted and rolled in chopped peanuts.  This is an ancient recipe that a  friend told me about eating years and years ago.  I found the recipe.  Apparently my mom made it.    Trying it out on the family.  

The critters were eating the tomatoes, and I put out some moth balls in little cat food containers among the tomato plants.  Suspect the cheeky chipmunks.  Lots of birds lately.  Hard to keep the feeders full. 

Do try the pesto.  I used a recipe very similar to Emerill's.  I've been harvesting dill, oregano, and rosemary, along with basil, mint and sage.  Parsley, too.  Garden is jungley from all the rain.  

Onward

 

Chicken Chausseur

Hadn't been to the grocery store in ages.  Getting hair done (finally) late this afternoon, so better get something cooked or ready to cook.  Freezer only offers bone-in, skin-on chicken breasts, a BOGO (buy one get one).  I have a voluminous file of recipes, and would you believe the chicken is divided into:
1)  rotisserie chicken
2)  boneless breaks
3)  Bone in breasts
4)  roasting recipes
 5)  recipes calling for a whole chicken


I dig out the bone-in breast recipes.   Find Chicken Chausser which calls for mushrooms which I have (none too fresh) and canned tomatoes.  Also calls for a shallot, but I can substitute a couple scallions and a garlic clove.  I don't have any broth but have a boullion cube and a little aspic from 2 former rotisserie chickens.  


I get started and the smell is pretty good.  Skin doesn't look too great so I remove most of that.  Brown chicken, mushrooms, add brandy, etc.  Decide to try the package of spaetzle from Ocean State Job Lot.  


A mere scrap of lettuce in the fridge, but there are a couple organic carrots, 1/3 of an English cuke, 5  big grape tomatoes, and said lettuce.  I add dill, oregano, basil and  a bit of mint and toss.  Looks and smells good.  Nice colors. 


The chicken sauce is a little salty, but the spaetzle needs salt, so that works out good.  Chicken very tasty, salad good, spaetzle a nice change.   We eat it for a late lunch instead of dinner.  


In the pantry there was oil, brandy and the substitutes for the shallot.  I always keep canned tomatoes around.  The salad was delicious, by the way.   It was damned near soup from a nail.  


 Breast halves were big enough for a second meal, and I have some ideas for the other package of breasts.  Even without skin, the breasts browned up  nicely. 


BTW, I have found the true secret to dieting.  You can eat absolutely anything you want.  Just eat less.  I've dropped 7 pounds with NO HUNGER.  Small helpings and no seconds except on fruits and veggies.  Fruit salad rocks in the summer, and todays salad of leftovers was a winner.  

The Chicken Chasseur recipe was from an old Cooks Illustrated magazine.  Anything calling for wine And brandy is bound to be pleasing to the tongue.


The Cheeseparer