True Kitchen Confessions

Readers, you may remember those potatoes that I dug up while taming my garden-gone-wild. 

Well, something bad happened to them. We’ll get to that.

I should first admit to you that I am either a brilliant cook or a horrible one and it’s never in-between.  Something that drives me absolutely batty is that Joseph IS a good cook.   He might even be considered GREAT, but I would never tell him for fear it would inflate his already sizeable cooking ego.  Now, let me tell you something, Joseph cooks once, maybe twice a year, and has his domain over such delectable dinners as Thanksgiving and Christmas.  He might dust off his pots and pans for Easter, but that’s pushing it.  And these are also the times we have guests over so I get to hear things like:

“Oh, you are so lucky!”

“You must eat like this every day!”

“I wish my husband would cook like yours does!”

“How do you deserve a guy like this?  What did you do?”

Well, I got news for all of you: I cook 363 days out of the year.  Whenever we eat something, it comes from my pots and pans.  I am the one scrubbing my Dutch oven out after a meal.  I’m the one who does the thankless, no one cares cooking.  What?  No applause?  Well, don’t worry I’m used to it. 

The way I cook used to include recipes when I was younger.  My Gram gave me a copy of Betty Crocker, and I love it.  But I’m the kind of guy who thinks that I’ve got the idea after I’ve cooked something once or twice.  Sometimes this works out great.  For things like stews, I throw whatever I feel like into my trusty Dutch oven, and delicious things always come out (after  a stew or two that did not invite second helpings, I got the idea of what worked and what didn’t).  I also rarely experiment.  (Part of me not experimenting is that Joseph always finds experiments not-as-good as he would have done, thanks.  The other part is I am a tiny bit lazy and don’t like fixing things that aren’t broken.) 

So, back to my potatoes:

You’d think that a guy from Idaho would be able to peel potatoes in seconds flat, but I almost always cook them with the skins on and this is more out of that laziness we’ve discussed rather than a fondness for flavor.  You’d also think an Idahoan would be able to cook a potato …

Joseph wanted Potato Salad, and I thought that the first day of summer would be a great day for fried chicken, potato salad, corn on the cob, and a coconut cream pie for desert.  Don’t get excited, I bought the pie!  So I boiled the eggs, added the mayonnaise and the jar of sweet relish along with some other spices (I also am always throwing random spices into things, I can never leave well enough alone).  I boiled the garden potatoes.  I left the large ones alone and boiled the small ones whole.  Then I drained them, added the egg-mayo mixture, and mashed it all together.  It felt a little harder than usual, but that was fine.  Joseph criticizes my potato salad the most for being “mashed potato salad” and having none of the original potato shapes in it. 

Now for the taste test! 

*CRUNCH!!!*

Raw crunchy potatoes were peppered all through the salad.  Apparently the only potatoes that boiled properly were the big ones I cut into pieces.  All those little potatoes just sat in the hot tub and refused to cook. 

My Great Aunt Katie, one of my favorite people of all time, never served a broken egg in her kitchen, even if it meant that she threw away a half of a dozen.  She hated broken eggs: they were a disgrace.  Well, this potato salad was a disgrace and I couldn’t face Joseph’s smugly disgusted look when he bit into a raw potato.  So I went straight to the compost pile and got rid of the evidence. 

After I simmered down, I made batch number two from store-bought russets.  I was out of sweet relish so I had to use my last jar of homemade (thank you) bread-and-butter pickles that came from my very own, garden-grown zucchini.  I chopped these up coarsely to add textural interest … or maybe just because I’m lazy.  (I’m sensing a pattern here.)  I added a new egg-mayo mixture to the batch with a little salt, a little pepper, a little turmeric, and a liberal dash of garlic powder and I had a happy husband! 

I burnt the chicken, for reasons I may get into later … not my fault, I am having oven trouble!!! 

Joseph loved it.  When he got home on Tuesday, he was a hog in heaven.  And what was his favorite part of the whole meal?  Nope, not the potato salad: it was that damn gosh darn, store-bought pie!