Sunday, January 24, 2010

Cooking by "feel"

I clearly recall watching my mother make some soup. She was standing there shaking salt into it and I thought to myself, "How does she know how much to put in?" It was incomprehensible to me that she didn't measure it exactly. Now I know. Of course, it just comes with experience.

Yesterday evening I made some potato salad so we could have it for lunch today after Church. I had boiled some whole potatoes in a Crock Pot and let them cool on a platter earlier in the day. So, here is how I make potato salad:

1. Peel the cooked potatoes and cut them into smallish chunks. Place them in a bowl that will leave plenty of room for stirring.

2. Peel and dice an onion. At this point you need to decide how much onion you want in your salad, and freeze the rest for use in some other dish. Add that to the bowl.

3. I use real mayonnaise, not "salad dressing" or Miracle Whip. Pour in mayonnaise and stir the potato/onion mix until it looks like everything is nicely coated, but not gloppy. Sometimes I make my own mayo in the blender, but not always.

4. I keep my sea salt in a container that I can reach into with my fingers. I take a generous pinch of that and sprinkle it over the salad.

5. Add some Dijon mustard, a bit of sugar and some sweet pickle relish.

6. Lastly, I add some hard boiled eggs that I have chopped.

7. Stir gently, taste to see if you need to add more of anything, put all the salad in your serving/storage bowl and sprinkle the top with paprika to make it look pretty.

Of course, you can add other things as the mood strikes, like chopped celery, sliced green olives, or if I have green onions, I will use those instead of the large bulb onion. (In fact, it was after dark and I was too lazy to stagger out through the mud to retrieve green onions from the greenhouse... but don't tell anyone.)

4 comments:

  1. Hi Yolanda,
    Good to see your comments again. I too wondered about the second worm bin. My understanding is to switch them when the top bin is mostly composted and then put stuff in the now second bin to entice the worms to leave the first bin and take up residence in the second bin. I better watch again, I may have that backwards. I will just look on the internet when I am ready to buy as I do not know of anyone around here. I do have a friend who raises rabbits who said she is going to start a bin under her rabbits. I like the idea of being able to use the worm juice. Its a wonderful fertilizer. Isnt laughing dog farm amazing and the hoop house videos are so educational.
    take care,
    debbieo

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yolonda,
    I did say that wrong. I watched the video again and he puts the newspaper and veggies and worms in the top bin and when it is as full as he wants it to be he swithces and put new stuff in the top bin and the worms crawl up to start on the new stuff.
    debbieo

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yolonda,
    It looked to me like he just let the worms ompost about 1/4 of the way up with their castings. He then swithced the top two bins and waits for them to move upstairs.
    Here is their website:
    http://www.livingasimplelife.com/
    I am going to try this one of these days. We just built a raised bed just out side of our side house door and I figured that would be a good place to bury a lot of stuff but I still want to try this indoors as well.
    I will let you know when I figure out where to get the worms.
    debbieo

    ReplyDelete
  4. Good luck with your raised bed! It might require more frequent watering than gardening down in the soil. I tried, for a while, burying out compostibles, but animals were forever digging it up. So, now I just toss everything into our bins and let the raccoons and other critters have what they want there!

    ReplyDelete

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