Cooking with Colwin.3: Three Potato Salads

Laurie Colwin includes three potato salads in her potato salad chapter, so what was I to do except cook them all?

(I skipped the fried chicken chapter because, to be perfectly honest, I don't like fried chicken at all and I don't have a chicken fryer.)

The first thing I have to say is that Colwin doesn't give many details about boiling the potatoes for the potato salad. She just says boil them. So I did. But I found them to be simultaneously so boiled on the outside that they might as well be mashed potatoes and a little crunchy on the inside. I'm thinking that, in the future, I might cut them up first and then boil them. Any thoughts from the more experienced cooks out there?

First, Karen Edwards's Warm Potato Salad with String Beans.

I cut the recipe in half, since I was making all three and knew I would be potato-saladed out, but it was still too much (this was my least favorite).

The recipe: Boil six Idaho potatoes and steam half a pound of string beans (I boiled them). Cut the warm potatoes to bite size, and cut the green beans into longish pieces.

The vinaigrette: 3/4 cup of olive oil, a teaspoon of Dijon mustard, the juice of one or two lemons, lots of garlic, salt and pepper.
 

Colwin writes, "The secret of this salad is lots and lots of dressing." The problem is, those darned Idaho potatoes (they're the most absorbent kind) absorbed the heck out of that dressing. Which is to say, I doubled the recipe for the vinaigrette, and it was still dry. And I wasn't willing to keep making and adding more dressing.

So I gave up and ate it. It reminded me a lot of ham, string beans, and potato soup. Which made me think, what if you added ham to potato salad?! Or maybe I should just make the soup.

Anyway, too dry.