My turn

Several days ago I received a letter in the mail from my mother-in-law. It was three pages. Two pages were the recipe for her potato salad, which I recently paid tribute.

I folded it and put it my recipe box, waiting for the perfect day to devote to dicing.

When do I have more time to wash, rewash, rewash, rewash, and rewash a cutting board than on a holiday weekend? And what better time to consume massive amounts of potato salad? I made my first attempt at making the best potato salad, ever, Sunday.

When my mother-in-law made her last batch, during a visit to Colorado nearly a month ago, she used 10 pounds of potatoes, an entire jar of mayonaisse, an entire jar of pickles, and a dozen eggs (and plus-sized amounts of the other ingredients). Thankfully she trimmed down the written recipe to a quarter of the size, so I only had to wrangle 2.5 pounds of potatoes. It didn’t seem like a lot, until it was time to dice them into cubes. The first couple of potatoes were proud to become perfectly symmetrical cubes. The kids could have used them to build a scale-model of a sugar cube factory. By the end of the 2. 5 pounds the chunks of potatoes looked like the brand new addition to the Denver Art Museum.

My rendition turned out quite well. Not only can I thank my mother-in-law for raising such an awesome, sweet guy, I can thank her for equiping me with another way to show my love for my family. Boiling, dicing, whipping, stirring, cutting, washing, measuring, sampling, adding, oopsing, and finally presenting…a true labor of love.

I have to admit I have always approached cooking as an unpleasant chore. With many disasters under my belt, my cooking confidence has fizzled into doubting my abilities to even let my Hamburger be Helped. All the domestic arts have eluded me, but I find myself becoming more attracted to and interesting in learning them. They take time to learn. I think it is worth it, though.