A Crush on Potato Salad

I tend to keep my friends a long time. I have two friends that I met in the playpen. Another showed me how to shave my legs at age thirteen. Still another sold me my second car at age twenty one.

Living nearby now are two friends I met when I was 15 and parked in a French boarding school in Cannes for the year that my Dad was sailing around the Mediterranean with his carrier division and the rest of the family was following the fleet through Italy and Greece. BonBon and Sunny each live about an hour away; we get together three or four times a year and always have a good time - last week, it was my turn to host.

As I was preparing a Salade Niçoise, the perfect meal for three women who shared a genteel prison for recalcitrant teenage girls on the Côte d'Azur, I remembered a tip I had learned in three places - that crushing the potatoes rather than neatly slicing them gives more surface area and more craggy texture for any sauce to stick to. So, I put my thumb firmly on my small, cold boiled redskin potatoes and pushed down until they broke into small, irregular chunks before adding minced red onion, chopped fennel and dressing them with a lemon/mustard/fresh lemon thyme vinaigrette.

The result was really the tastiest potato salad I've enjoyed in quite some time. The rough, rustic texture really did soak up the tangy sauce, giving far more flavor to the cold salad than my usual sliced or diced potatoes did. My buddies and My Beloved all polished off the potato salad on their plates - I count that as a success.

I plan to try this technique with the next American potato salad I make, too. I've always had a crush on potato salad and now it's literal as well as figurative.