Yes, We Have No Potatoes In Lake Wobegon!

Wobegon Boy offers a 4^th of July meditation on books and potato salad. Unfortunately, in his paean to homemade potato salad, Wobegon Boy supplies a less-than-helpful recipe for this summer staple. This blog leaves no recipe behind and as a public service (thanks to Google), a so-called "easy" recipe follows. If the reader is a potato salad mullah, like Wobegone Boy, the "easy" recipe's use of canned new potatoes will raise hackles. Not to fear, the "easy" recipe includes a fresh potato alternative.

Mom's Easy Potato Salad
Printed from Cooks.com

3 cans diced Del Monte new potatoes, drained
6 hard-boiled eggs, diced
3/4 cup finely chopped celery
1 medium sweet onion, minced
1 large dill pickle, diced (claussen)
1/2 teaspoon celery seed
2 tablespoons dill pickle juice
1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
1 tablespoon chopped pimento
1/4 cup (or less) yellow mustard
1 cup mayonnaise
paprika to taste over finished salad
salt and pepper to taste

In a medium size bowl, mix 1 cup mayonnaise with enough yellow mustard to make it a soft yellow, add pickle juice, dry mustard, celery seed, potatoes, eggs, celery, onion, diced pickle and chopped pimento, combine all, salt and pepper to taste.

Cook's Note: To use fresh potatoes for this recipe, boil 5 large potatoes in 2 quarts of water with 1/2 tablespoon salt. When fork tender, remove skins when the potatoes are cool enough to handle. Alternately, scrub red or new potatoes well before boiling and leave the skin on. Cut into 1 inch cubes. Proceed as above with remaining recipe.

Submitted by: Don L

Well, there you have it. Real potato salad is possible and Wobegon Boy can sleep the sleep of innocents on the 4^th. If this is (fair & balanced) gastronomic patriotism, so be it.

[x Salon]
It's Time To Stand Up For Homemade Potato Salad
By Garrison Keillor

Tag Cloud of the following article

along bald beautiful become boil books bring bucket celery children chop coming couple dickens diligent eagle endangered ennobled family heading hobnob homemade independence indolence live manufactured matter maybe member monogamy movie muck onions page paper people potato reading salad seems shore six stuff teach theater took tubs walk weekend young

created at TagCrowd.com

I walked the length of the westbound Lake Shore Limited as it left Albany last Sunday, six crowded coaches, and counted three Twitterers and a couple of phone texters, six laptoppers (two of whom were watching movies), four video gamers, and 27 people reading books. Books made of paper! Turning the pages with their fingers one by one, reading the lines left to right, just as people have done for hundreds of years. Ain't that something?

I didn't lean down for a close look at the books they were reading — I was not brought up to do that — so perhaps bodices were being ripped and stalkers were stalking and meteorites were heading straight for Earth, but no matter. Books were being read!

Along with live theater, monogamy and the bald eagle, the paper book has been despaired over and its demise freely predicted, and yet, among people heading west, it seems to be the diversion of choice. So Dickens and Jane Austen and Flannery O'Connor are not dead yet.

And the bald eagle is coming back, along with the gray wolf and the Yellowstone grizzly — though less attractive endangered species such as the glassy-eyed smelt and the orangefoot pimpleback mussel and various arachnids are still in doubt — and theater seems as alluring as ever, judging by the number of young New York waiters with large personalities. And as for monogamy, it's there, waiting to be rediscovered.

So let me speak up for an endangered menu item this Fourth of July weekend and that is homemade potato salad.

When the family meets this weekend to hobnob and burn burgers, the family member assigned to bring the potato salad is likely going to walk in with a couple of gallon plastic buckets of yellowish muck bought at a convenience store, the price stickers still on them, and set them down on the table with no apology whatsoever.

Or, if they have more disposable income, they'll bring paper containers full of brownish muck from the natural organic sustainable united empathetic co-op.

If you bring garbage to share with your family, the least you can do is tell a lie and say, "I couldn't make the potato salad myself because I am bipolar and my lover left me and my dog has leukemia and I have an oozing leprous sore on my mixing hand."

It is not that hard to make potato salad, people. Take half an hour away from your Facebook page and do the job right. Boil some eggs, chop the celery and chives and green onions, boil the potatoes, make your mayonnaise, maybe toss in a little sour cream, use plenty of dill, and sprinkle paprika on top. The eerie-yellow store-bought stuff in the tubs was manufactured at Amalgamated Salad in Houston by undocumented 12-year-olds from the hills of Michoacan. Worse, it is teaching our children that accomplishment doesn't matter.

A child served yellow slop from a bucket is being told that it's OK to plagiarize a term paper off the Internet just so long as it's poorly written.

What if Thomas Jefferson had been too busy hobnobbing to write the Declaration of Independence so he just downloaded a bunch of stuff he found Googling "independence" and coming up with stuff about indolence, pendants, incontinence, but hey, close enough, and he pasted it together and they all signed it and went out to a movie? Not good.

When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the potato salad that has connected them with another, they will do it, believe me, so why insult us? Just because we're polite, do you think we can't tell the difference? Are we demented? Does this not seem self-evident to you?

Attend to the details. Teach your children manners. Write cogent paragraphs. Drive carefully. And make a good potato salad, one with some crunch, maybe accompanied by a fried drumstick with crackly skin — the humble potato and the stupid chicken, ennobled by diligent cooking — and is this not the meaning of our beautiful country, to take what is common and enable it to become beautiful? All our beautiful young people — so diligent and focused and powered by hope — you can't tell me those kids didn't have parents who took time to chop the celery and onions and experiment with the ratio of mayo to mustard to achieve a potato salad that is worthy of our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor. Ω

[Garrison Keillor is an author, storyteller, humorist, and creator of the weekly radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." The show began in 1974 as a live variety show on Minnesota Public Radio. In the 1980s "A Prairie Home Companion" became a pop culture phenomenon, with millions of Americans listening to Keillor's folksy tales of life in the fictional Midwestern town of Lake Wobegon, where (in Keillor's words) "the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all of the children are above average." Keillor ended the show in 1987, and 1989 began a similar new radio show titled "American Radio Company of the Air." In 1993 he returned the show to its original name. Keillor also created the syndicated daily radio feature "A Writer's Almanac" in 1993. He has written for The New Yorker and is the author of several books, including Happy to Be Here (1990), Leaving Home (1992), Lake Wobegon Days (1995), and Good Poems for Hard Times (2005). Keillor's most recent book is a new Lake Wobegon novel, Liberty. His radio show inspired a 2006 movie, "A Prairie Home Companion," written by and starring Keillor and directed by Robert Altman. Keillor graduated (B.A., English) from the University of Minneosta in 1966. His signature sign-off on "The Writer's Almanac" is "Be well, do good work, and keep in touch."]

Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves