I love getting vegetable from my CSA Kawartha Ecological Growers. However, as most subscribers of CSA can attest, you often get vegetables that you otherwise may not put in your shopping basket at a grocery store. For me, that would be potatoes. Don't be mistaken, I love potatoes. However, since it's so filling and starchy with a high glycemic index, I don't typically include it in my diet. Potatoes are undeniably a standard in North American cuisine so it's entirely understandable why they make frequent appearances in my share including heirloom varieties of such pretty colour.
Our first winter share this season included over three pounds of Red Chieftain, an excellent boiling potato. I used a couple for the Ten Vegetable Stew but that still left me with two and a half pounds. Potato salad would easily use up the whole bag before more potatoes come my way this week. I made a few different potato salads in the last year and know how delicious this simple preparation can be. Classic potato salad made with mayonnaise is rich and fattening, precisely not what I have in mind recently. Enter the America's Test Kitchen! Their Amish Potato Salad interested me because the dressing is made with cider vinegar, hardboiled egg yolk, sour cream, sugar, mustard, and celery seeds. Just reading the list of ingredient already promises a luscious dressing without the heaviness of mayonnaise! I'm a bit picky about sour cream though. All too often, they are laced with additives and stablizers for longer shelf life. Whatever happen to plain and simple cultured sour cream?! Luckily, in my neck of the woods, natural sour cream can still be found without a wild goose chase. My preferred choice is Western Creamery's full fat sour cream.
The recipe is originally published in Cook's Country and calls for three pounds of potatoes. Since I only had two and a half pounds after peeling and trimming, I took the liberty to bulk up the salad to maintain the balance of dressing to vegetable. In addition to the chopped hardboiled eggs, my salad contains three stalks of celery for extra crunch, green onions sliced on a bias for more savory taste, and two unpeeled golden delicious apples to echo the cider vinegar in the dressing. I really like the refreshing taste apples add to the potato salad even though it lands the dish a bit on the sweet side. Besides, how cute is that when pomme de terre and pomme are united for a Double 'Pomme' Salad?
Nutritional analysis is available here based on 8 servings.