The Potato Salad Post...

Labor Day is over. Summer is at an end...well, we've actually got almost three more weeks of the season, by the calendar, but here in the United States, the Labor Day holiday weekend marks the unofficial end of summer. Pretty much everyone who goes to school is back in class now, the college football season has begun and the professional pre-season is underway, and it seems like every other ad on television right now is promoting one or another of the new fall programs.

And that is fine with me. I'm sick of summer, sick of the hot weather (although over the weekend, we're forecast to have high temperatures as high as 104 degrees F), and ready for the sun to start setting earlier.

But, there is one manifestation of summer - and summer picnics - that I'm not willing to give up over the cooler months, and that is the potato salad. Some people quit making potato salads after Labor Day (it's just Not Done after the holiday, sort of like wearing white shoes), but I love potato salad and make it all year round. Truthfully, I'm more likely to make potato salad during the cooler weather, since boiling the potatoes (and the eggs, if I want to put them in the salad) takes a while and heats up the kitchen, which is a good thing in the cooler months but not during the summer. I did, however, make a potato salad for the holiday yesterday. Part of it is still in the refrigerator, and I plan to eat some of it for lunch as soon as I finish writing this post.

I make a nice simple potato salad. Looking around online, I see that some people put all kinds of things in their potato salads: different herbs, different vegetables, different dressings. Which is all good, I guess. But I like my potato salads simple, and I still make my potato salad just like my grandmother taught me to, when I was about three or four years old. It's a simple recipe and suits my tastes just fine.

To make my (my grandmother's) potato salad, you boil the potatoes (white rose or Yukon gold potatoes are best, but plain old russets will do just fine) and the eggs, if you like eggs in your salad. The potatoes are done when you can slide a fork into them easily and the skins split when you stick the fork in them. I also hard-boil eggs differently than some people do: I put the pan of cold water containing the eggs on to boil; when they come to a hard boil, I set the timer for ten minutes. When the timer goes off, I take the pan containing the eggs off the burner and let them sit for a few (four or five) minutes. Then I pour off the water and fill the pan with more cold water and let the eggs sit until the water is warm from the heat of the eggs and pan. I pour off that water and repeat the cold water bath two or three more times, until the eggs are cool enough to handle easily. Then, when both potatoes and eggs are cool enough, I put them on a plate and place them in the refrigerator until they are cold.

When I'm making salad just for myself, I usually cook six medium-sized potatoes and two or three eggs. That makes enough salad for four or five generous servings, which ensures that the salad lasts two or three days, not long enough for it to go bad in the refrigerator.

The next step, when potatoes and eggs are cold, is to peel them and then dice them into a bowl that is big enough to hold them and mix the other ingredients into them without spilling any onto the counter. Once the potatoes and eggs are diced, add salt and pepper to taste. Then add mayonnaise and mix. This is going to be a moist salad, so I always add just a little less mayo than I think makes the salad moist enough. After the mayo is mixed in, I add yellow mustard, again to taste - this is another reason why I use a bit less mayo than it looks like it would take to make an acceptable salad - and mix again. If I have them, I then add some sliced or wedged black olives and mix those in but, like the eggs, the olives are not strictly necessary to make a good salad. Next, I add apple cider vinegar to taste and mix. I like vinegar, so I usually add more than some people would. But, even though I do like vinegar, I don't add enough to drown the salad. After the vinegar is mixed in, I also add a small bit of water - usually just a palm-full or two. Keeping in mind that I have pretty small hands, that really isn't much water.

I usually add the vinegar in a couple of stages, to make sure I don't get too much or too little. If you see it pooling in the bottom of the bowl right after mixing, you've added too much. The same is true for the water, so you want to be very careful when adding these two ingredients.

At this stage, the potato salad is ready to eat. However, I try to make my salad enough ahead of time so that I can put it, covered, in the refrigerator for at least an hour or two, to let the flavors of the dressing ingredients meld. The value of this is seen in the fact that this salad always tastes better the second day.

I also want to mention that you don't want to let the salad sit out on the counter for very long after mixing it or after serving. My roommate is less casual about this than I am, but I was raised that you don't let food with mayonnaise, even with vinegar in it, which acts as a preservative, sit out for more than a few minutes. So, that's my safety warning.

Do you make your potato salad a different way? Drop your favorite recipe in the comments, because as much as I love my simple potato salad, I'm open to trying new things as well.

Now, my mouth is watering just thinking about the potato salad sitting in my refrigerator, and it is time for lunch. I'm going to go now and have some of my salad, and a couple of slices of toast, maybe, or a sliced tomato on the side.

Oh, and don't worry. I won't be writing too many of these cooking posts. I'm more of a heat-and-assemble sort of person than a cooking enthusiast. But, I do love potato salad and the store-bought stuff just doesn't compare to this salad that my grandmother taught me how to make, lo, those many long years ago.

Music Extra: Summer Songs...

As I wrote here the other day, spring fever has set in around here in a big way. Only, it isn't quite spring yet even though the temperatures we've seen here locally have seemed more like summer. Well, early summer, since in the middle of summer it isn't unusual for this region to see temperatures past 100 degrees F. The last couple of days it has been in the mid-80s F, which can on occasion be the low temperature at the height of summer. But, when it's been in the 50s F for highs as recently as a couple of weeks ago, mid-80s feel like summer. We've even been running the air conditioner.

Now, it would be nice if I could give in to my spring fever, but with volunteer work, looking for a real job, and working on writing a book, I've been more than busy - as my sporadic posting here this week has indicated. So, I've been resisting the lure of sitting outside in the warmth with a good book and a glass of lemonade and getting on with the things I need to do. This hasn't been as difficult as it might seem, though, since the warm weather also means that things are blooming - with a vengeance - and that means the onset of allergy season. Since I'm allergic to multiple things that grow around here, every time I stepped outside yesterday I started either coughing or sneezing or both.

At any rate, I thought that before I have to go back out into the warmth and the allergens later today to go to a meeting at CVP, I would share a few songs that resonate with the apparent season around here.

First of all, here is George Harrison singing "Here Comes the Sun" at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971. It seems an appropriate song since even though it hasn't rained as much as it should here locally over the winter, it has been cloudy a lot, and it is nice to see the sun:



This kind of weather is baseball weather, and the season is coming soon. So there's this song, "Swing", by Trace Adkins, which is about baseball, and also about striking out or not in that other spring pastime - love, lust, and romance:



That isn't exactly a traditional baseball song. For that, there's John Fogerty's "Centerfield":



There are a lot of songs about summer. Some of them are just about summer, and some of them are about, well, more. One of these is "The Boys of Summer", by Don Henley. It's too nice a day to engage in serious analysis, however, and so I'll just leave this here for you:



An older summer song, "Summer in the City" (1966), by The Lovin' Spoonful, contrasts summer days and summer nights:



It's possible that where you are reading this from, summer weather hasn't arrived yet, or is just going away if you happen to be in the Southern Hemisphere. But, is there really a bad time for a summer song? As far as I'm concerned, summer is a state of mind as much as it is a season. Then again, I grew up in Southern California, where you can have summer-like weather on any given day of the year, so my perceptions on the subject might be slightly skewed.

Various and sundry on a Friday afternoon...

Yikes. It's been a month again since I've posted.

After that spate of posts in the middle of July, I thought I was back to writing on a regular basis (or at least on as regular a basis as I've ever posted here). But not so much, apparently.

And, it isn't as if I haven't had the time to post something. I was without transportation except for my feet and the bus for the entire month of July, and then a couple of weeks ago, my work hours were cut back drastically. This is not good news, considering that fact that the unemployment rate in my area is over 16 percent. So, I've been trying to figure out how to get some new revenue streams going, with not much success so far. At least, with school starting, I can get out there in the next couple of weeks and try to drum up some tutoring business.

I think that might be part of why I haven't been posting much. My paying gig involves writing news on the finance markets...stocks, oil, and metals, mostly...and it's just all so depressing that I just haven't felt like doing much of anything much of the time. I don't care what the politicians have been trying to sell, the economy is not getting any better, nor is it likely to for the forseeable future.

I did see, in relation to this, that Michelle Bachmann is out on the campaign trail claiming that if she is elected president, she'll make sure that the price of gasoline goes back down to $2 per gallon. Yeah, right. Anyone who believes that she - or any president - has the power to do that, deserveds her as president. And Rick Perry called Ben Bernanke (he's the head of the Federal Reserve) a traitor for his monetary policy.

Come on, kids. It's over a year until the general election. Can we at least save the character assassination and pie-in-the-sky promises until after Christmas?

This is probably another reason I haven't been writing here much. I tend to get snarky at the least provocation these days. Maybe it's the weather, although we've actually had a milder-than-normal summer here in Central California. It hasn't been cool by any means, but we also haven't had nearly as many as 100-degree plus days as we usually do (something I hope continues for the rest of the summer). So, you know, if this is climate change, it's at least changing for the slightly better around here.

At least I've been doing something productive this summer, hatching plans for some writing ventures that I think might have potential and knitting some things for donation to a local shelter once the weather gets cooler. It might not get as cold here as it does in some parts for the country and the world during the winter, but there are people who will need scarves and stuff to keep them warm. And, when a good friend's yarn shop closed last year (has it been that long?), I took home a lot of the donation yarn people had given her to make things for a local charity. I'd been wondering what to do with it all until I decided one day that scarves are quick and easy to knit, and giving them away would uphold the purpose the people who had donated the yarn had in mind for it.

So. That's my summer so far. Snark and knitting (and you don't know just how well those two things get along until you've spend some time on Ravelry - go Google it if you don't know what it is) and trying not to get to depressed by work and the things I write about there. How's yours been so far?