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.)