Boiling potatoes, boiling eggs. Is it so wrong?!1 I'll understand if Lounge passes on my invite.
So back in my semi/fringe-notreally hippie days, I interviewed my mother and wrote down the family recipes, then tried them myself and happily discovered this was something I could do (follow a recipe), and for a period of a few years stuck by them, like, sacrosanct. But, hippies being hippies, we thought we were discovering everything for ourselves, that nobody from the past knew what we were learning, and to a degree some things were good: I began tampering slightly with the mother recipes. The first thing was shocking to her: Leaving the skins on the potatoes (nutrients, doncherno) for potato salad. But I went bolder and bolder, substituting olive oil in some lard things, and substituting pork chop chunks for bacon in something else, and instead of toasting bread for dressing, using Pepperidge Farm herbal/wheat/white stuffing instead. Oh, and I don't get why my then teenaged sister made a big deal out of mixing mayo with mustard in a separate container before adding it into the salad. I now just put the dollops straight into the thing and mix them in there. Fine.
But one practice has less to do with ingredients than with practices, which is what I throw on the bench of Lounge for righteous judgment: Just as a time-saving thing, it occurred to me at some point that to boil potatoes and eggs for potato salad, what might be the harm of boiling them together? To go back a bit, I also hit upon cubing the potatoes RAW, not boiling them whole and cutting them up afterward. So, I do rinse the eggs before slipping them into the pan. Is somebody gagging here?!1
I'll throw in a tip a DUer posted here a few years ago: I cited a recipe that said, "Heat the oil until it smokes," and got lambasted on the grounds that this releases carcinogens. Then a good soul mitigated the lesson with, "I'm a German dude, but know something about cooking, heat the oil until you see wavy waves, that's the correct temperature." I've been doing that ever since.
Oh, and my mother was a busy and accomplished person. Both parents worked outside of the house, but in that era the entirety of household management was the woman's lot, so she was busy and tired, and cooked daily but kept things somewhat rationed and therefore the more special. Cooking was not her favorite thing, although I'll forever swear nothing has ever tasted so good as what she made. But anyway, one of her sayings as she sometimes complained over the cooking, "You've got to FEEL LIKE IT for it to come out right."
And as long as I'm rambling on the topic of ingested things, I took Lounge advice a few days ago to concoct one tablespoon of apple cider vinegar to eight ounces of water (plus a packet of stevia), as a flavored drink to substitute for green tea (caffeine, besides yucky taste) and it's tolerable, not lip smackingly so, so I'll stick with it for a trial.
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