Recipe Index Page

OK, I'm gonna start with my potato salad recipe. This is my first posted recipe. If you like it, I'll upload some more, and make an index to help you find them.

This potato salad recipe makes about 2 servings. I'm gonna get a picture for you. Maybe a video. The dish is entirely vegan and very simple. Takes about 1 hour and 15 minutes to make. All the ingredients are basic ingredients, that is, each ingredient consists of only one ingredient. For packaged products, for example cayenne pepper flour, on the product label, only one item is listed after the legend "ingredients:" In the case of cayenne pepper flour, the title says "Ground (cayenne) Red Pepper" and the ingredient list says "ingredients: cayenne pepper." It has obviously been finely ground into a powder. I try to avoid using an ingredient with a label that contains a list of ingredients. For example I could have used Tobasco Sauce, which if I recall correctly, contains hot red peppers, vinegar, and salt. But I choose to keep things simple.

Here are the ingredients:

  1. 2 rather large potatoes (each about 10 cm in diameter), or 3 medium-sized (8 cm), or 5 smallish potatoes (5 cm). I use the pink-skinned variety. I don't use any of the dry russet varieties. You feel a dramatic difference in texture between the 2 kinds, as you bite into an 8mm thick piece of potato, cooked al dente.
  2. 1 medium carrot
  3. 1 medium sized sweet red pepper
  4. cilantro, 75 ml if coarsely chopped (maybe 15 stems with leaves)
  5. 2 medium sized stalks of celery
  6. 30 ml of unrefined, cold pressed sesame oil
  7. vegetable juice, mostly carrot. Could also have celery, and a little turnip, and yellow beet. About 1/2 a cup should be more than enough.
  8. Almond butter, from unblanched almonds. About a teaspoon.
  9. Cayenne pepper flour, less than 0.5 ml, just a teensy teensy bit, so that you can barely detect any heat in the finished dish. Note that even though you can barely taste the cayenne pepper itself, it influences how the other ingredients are perceived. Alternatively you could of course use fresh hot peppers, very finely chopped fresh hot peppers, any kind should do.
  10. Salt, about 2 ml

Tools

  1. 3 quart stainless steel pot suitable for steaming, having a tri-ply stainless steel clad aluminum bottom and a nicely sealing lid.
  2. Potato-carrot peeler type thing. For peeling the potatoes you could substitute the paring knife but it is hard to peel a carrot with a paring knife without being wasteful.
  3. Large spoon.
  4. Stovetop burner, preferably gas.
  5. Hardwood cutting board.
  6. Chef's knife with 20 to 30 cm blade.
  7. Paring knife.
  8. Grater.

Cut the potatoes into discs about 2 centimeters thick. A medium potato will be cut into about 4 to 6 such discs. 2 cm is just about the right size to make the disk easy to peel. Peel each disk by going around its circumference with a vegetable peeler, or very sharp paring knife. I use a carbon steel paring knife for this purpose, since I find it difficult to get a stainless steel knife sharp enough with my basic sharpening tools. Leaving a bit of peel on the potato here and there is ok. After peeling, slice the discs into pieces about 3/4 of a centimeter thick.

Steam al dente, just until potato pieces are cooked though and maybe 30 seconds to a minute more. Put about an inch of water in the bottom of a good pot and cover the pot. Add some salt. Add the potatoes. Add a couple of drops of oil to help keep the potato pieces from sticking to the bottom of the pot and to keep the steaming water from foaming too much. You can see the difference in translucency between an area of potato that is cooked through, and the whiter area that isn't cooked through. If you are going to use fresh hot peppers, add them about 2 minutes before the potatoes finish cooking.

Start cooling off the potatoes by running cold water along the outside of the pot. The water they they were cooked in, at the bottom of the pot, will be thick and syrupy.

Wash a carrot, cut off just enough of the stem end so that the soil that accumulates between the stem and the root, gets cut away. Cut off the thin root tip. Unless the skins are really fresh looking, peel the skins with a carrot-potato peeler.

Using the grater, grate the carrot into 1-2 centimeter-long shavings. I use the side of the grater with 9 mm holes. It takes only a minute. Rinsing out the grater afterwards takes longer than if you rinse it out right away. Do it right away before the carrots stick. If you don't have a grater you could use the vegetable peel. Just peel and peel, peel the carrot until there is nothing left of it put peels.

Wash and dice the sweet red pepper. Wash and dice the celery stalks. My trick for removing the stem from the sweet pepper is cut around the circumference of the pepper, near the stem, at the part of the pepper where the circumference is largest or almost the largest. Then pull the whole top of the pepper out, by pulling on the stem. If you've cut at the right place, the stem will have very little support, and just pop out of the pepper-top, leaving a ring of pepper. Wash away any soil where the stem was, before you chop up the ring of pepper.

Wash and then coarsely chop the cilantro.

Making sure the potatoes are not hot to the touch, that is, not hot enought to hurt if you leave your finger inside the pot of potatoes, throw the celery, grated carrots, and sweet red pepper into the pot with the potatoes. Add it tiny bit of cayenne pepper flour. Stir.

You can add some carrot juice, or carrot-celery juice, so as to thin out the thick, syrupy water, containing potato starch, that the cool potatoes are sitting in, stirring as you go. Keep an eye on how thick the syrupy glue becomes. You don't want it too thick or too thin. I keep a supply of vegetable juice frozen, to use when needed. It will give the potatoes a nice color as well as add flavor.

Add the sesame oil, add salt to taste, and add the almond butter. The almond butter will thicken the sauce up again. Then mix in the chopped cilantro, to taste.

Let sit for about an hour then serve. If you let it sit longer, like for 4 hours, the water from the vegetables will seep into the sauce and thin it. If it gets too thick, you add a bit more almond butter. Or if you are planning to delay serving, when you first make the sauce make it a bit thicker than would seem to be the right thickness.