Potato Salad with Flavour

You know how potatoes kind of taste like nothing? It's a sad fact that most people probably don't think potatoes have a flavour besides maybe "starchy", and I hardly call that a flavour. The fact that you need to coat them in a large amount of some kind of fat to make them worth cooking is not okay to me. There's nothing like a home made mayonnaise, but when there's just one of me and a whole lot of egg yolk, I get a little discouraged from putting in all the whisking effort, and then figuring out what to do with the egg whites and leftovers that want to attack me with salmonella if I leave them in the fridge for a few days. Picture a little war in your stomach. I don't want that. I avoid conflict.

So in my fridge I had organic potatoes from a small farm on the Quebec/Ontario border owned by an Ethiopian man and his wife. These are beautiful potatoes. Basically the whole concept of the farm was that this man moved from Ethiopia and didn't understand why food didn't taste like anything here, so he looked into how farms generally produce vegetables here, and decided this wouldn't do. Now he has his own farm and sells a lot of his produce year-round at ridiculously good prices (especially for the middle of winter when anything organic in frost-filled Montreal could cost a fortune and people would fork it over...so to speak). So I had a veggie co-op bag full of vegetables and ended up with about 4 lbs of potatoes. I love roasting them, but I got a craving for potato salad...creamy but dairy- and mayonnaise-free. Well, almost.

I took three recipes (one for a mustard pepper dressing, one for a creamy garlic dressing and one specifically for potato salad) and put together the best parts of each, then added a few extras:

1/3 cup green onions, diced (white part and a little bit of green)
2 tbsp. apple cider vinegar (only because I ran out of red wine vinegar and balsamic...it worked fine though)
2 tbsp dijon (I love the strong flavour, but if you don't, bump it down to 1 tbsp)
1 tsp garlic powder (you can use one minced clove of garlic but I prefer the milder flavour of the powder)
1 tsp honey or sugar
salt and pepper to taste
1/3 cup thick plain probiotic yogurt (not a fat-free kind or you'll end up with potato in yogurt soup. Soup is usually comfort food, but this? Not comfort food...)
2 tbsp. fresh cilantro or parsley, chopped
1 tbsp. olive oil

Whisk everything together except the olive oil and then add the oil in a thin stream, whisking constantly. Adjust the flavouring. At first it was too acidic from the vinegar so I added more yogurt. Then it lacked depth of flavour so I added more olive oil and garlic. If you're Greek, add more olive oil and yogurt. If you're French, add more dijon. If you're Canadian...well, go about it diplomatically and politely by adding a bit of everything and getting nowhere...

Then just toss it with about 1 1/2 lbs of potatoes that you've chopped into 1/2" pieces, steamed or boiled, and drained. You can let the potatoes sit while you make the dressing so their cooking liquid evaporates a little. Again, you don't want potato yogurt soup.

Once the dressing was on the potatoes the bite of it kind of faded and I felt like it needed more dijon, but I generally always think things need more dijon.

The next day, though, all the zing of the dressing had disappeared. All I could taste was yogurt...so I tried to salvage it by adding more dijon. Nope. Then I tried adding a bit of white balsamic, mostly because I'd just bought it and wanted to see if it was any good. Nope, didn't work. It made it sweet and fruity. Oops. Well, it wasn't bad, and I'll try again tomorrow to make the leftovers better. I think I may succumb to mincing fresh garlic. I know salt would probably help, or I could cheat and add a little tamari, but I really think those things shouldn't be necessary...we'll see. Oh! lemon juice??? Hmm...

Moral of the post: Get some really good organic potatoes, scrub them, don't peel them, and find a way to make them creamy without mayonnaise. At least then when you follow the rule "Everything in excess, moderation is for nuns", you won't have to worry so much about your heart and blood pressure mutinying.

Osso buco suggestions?? Anyone else? Speaking of gluttony...