Potato Salad Season

Ratatouille, Tomato Bread Salad, Insalata Capreses, and Potato Salad are all wonderful tastes of summer.

Cooking up a storm this week with the house guests. Catering to 3 people, one of whom is a super-picky vegetarian kid who doesn't like macaroni and cheese and spurns a lot of vegetables--a real challenge. I have basically given up pleasing everyone, but the adults were blown away by this potato salad:
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/recipe_views/views/105282

I started making it years ago when we went to an annual house party in Easthampton. It never failed to please. Flavors are robust, so if Annie's macaroni and cheese is your idea of flavorful, go for something blander. Nothing against Annie, except that hers was most most tasteless, as in no taste, product I had ever eaten. Hold the cheese, hold the salt, hold the seasonings. Oh well, I guess that's why two year olds only eat plain plain plain. I say give them curry and salsa and Sichuan.

A new movie someone might consider is Toddlers on A Plane, sort of like Snakes on a Plane. They all scream and refuse to sit down and disrupt the safety instruction and pour their sippy cups down the flight attendants shirt fronts. I travelled with toddlers once, and they were taught how to behave.

The most amazing sight I ever saw was a woman alone boarding an overseas flight with four kids, a baby, a toddler and two older (9 - 13 year old) kids. Well, this will be fun, I thought, as they were sitting very close by. What happened was that the 13 year old took the baby, the nine (or thereabouts) took the toddler, and the mom read a magazine. It took a while to figure out that this was a military family, and the kids had always travelled, and the older ones took care of the younger ones. Not that Mom was uninvolved, but she had her leisure to read and there was not a single squawk, screech, or bawl all the way across the Atlantic. There was certainly no holding up of the aircraft's takeoff while the parents "tried to calm" the child. So not every toddler is a terror. I blame the parents for raising a little tyrant.

And it all started with potato salad. Now I am out into the garden to transplant some petunias who really don't like the shade and there is still a bare sunny spot in the garden.

Tonight we are eating potato pancakes (latkes)which everyone likes a lot. With bacon, sour cream and applesauce. Not exactly low cal. I'm making a cherry caflouti for dessert.

Last night we chowed down at Vinny T's in Dedham. Good food and lots of it at reasonable prices. We brought home about two meals worth. It's a good place to take kids, by the way. The salad with blue cheese, apples, walnuts and romaine got four stars in my book. Yum!

Onward with trowel and determination.

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