Gourmet Diary May 4, 2005

With springtime followed closely with the summer heat ahead, Iım anxious to begin eating meals out on our newly completed patio beside the koi pond.

Dining alfresco means, to me, fresh meals with lots of fruits and vegetables, some cold, some room temperature, and some hot. Iıve been in the mood to read a lot of recipes lately and have tried out quite a few, making changes as necessary to suit my own tastes.

Yesterday I had in mind to try out a recipe on some friends, and as I tinkered around in the early part of the day I was thinking about this one particular recipe I had seen which sounded good. In my mind, there was a cilantro dressing, and I began to actually taste it before I even got home to begin preparing the dish. I really looked forward to the dish, but once I got out the recipe I had downloaded and looked through it, I saw, with disappointment, that it wasnıt at all what I had remembered. So I changed it. Simple. The result was a really delicious potato salad, worth fixing again. The original was higher in fat, lower in flavor (from the ingredients it actually did contain) so I modified it quite a bit. Here is the result: a really good and quite different potato salad.

Joan Jackson
Gourmet Diary, in the Chico, California, Enterprise-Record, Oroville Mercury Register


Creamy Potato Salad with Cilantro

4 to 6 cups of small red potatoes, halved
1/3 cup nonfat sour cream
1/3 cup regular sour cream
1/3 cup mayonnaise
1/2 bunch green onions, some of the white and some of the green parts
(roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup)
2 tablespoons fresh cilantro leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice

Wash the potatoes and set them to steam or boil until they are tender.Remove the skins from some of them to lighten the texture of the dish. Leave about half with skins on. When the potatoes are cooked through, set them aside to cool completely. In the meantime, in a food processor or blender (a food processor is preferable here), combine the nonfat sour cream, the regular sour cream, mayonnaise, green onions, and cilantro, and pulse until the cream is merely flecked with the herbs, well mixed, and smooth. At this point, add the salt, pepper and lemon juice, pulse again, and taste. Combine with the potato pieces, and stir well but gently. It is an old cookıs trick to remove excess salt in soups and stews by adding pieces of potato, so with that knowledge, keep in mind that potato dishes require a little extra salt in order for the dish to balance. In this potato salad, the flavor will intensify over the next hour, so taste again and adjust the salt, pepper and lemon juice to your taste.

The cilantro, also known in other parts of the world as coriander leaves, is also a nod to the Cinco de Mayo celebrations this week. There will be a lot of guacamole and other Mexican dishes consumed this week, so this is definitely the week to shop the supermarkets for good deals on avocados, mangos, and cilantro, among other things.

Take pleasure in your life today, and enjoy what you eat!