Eat This: Potato-Cucumber Salad

I got a new cookbook for the holidays—Nigel Slater’s Tender—and I’ve spent the last week or so poring over the gorgeous photography and Slater’s stories about how he began growing vegetables in his backyard in London. One of the easiest recipes I found during my initial reading was for a salad of boiled potatoes with cucumber slices, in a Dijon dressing (with a bit of cider vinegar, olive oil, and crushed juniper berries). So I tried it last night, and it came out really well! It’s very simple to make, maybe a half hour from start to finish, and the end results were delicious.

I think the next time I make this dish, I’ll probably do a few slight adjustments: I used the high end of the recommended range of potatoes to boil, and that was probably more appropriate for a party of four, rather than just for me and my wife, so I’ll bring that down a notch. And I suspect I could’ve added a little bit more black pepper to the dressing as I was mixing it; I gave the grinder a fair number of twists, but the dressing feels like it could stand a few more. I’m also vaguely curious about what swapping out the juniper berries with crushed garlic cloves might do in terms of flavor, but I won’t be getting around to that for a while. (For one thing, I’ve got all these juniper berries left…)

This salad was so easy to prepare, though, that it encourages me to dive even further into Tender, and its fruit-themed sequel Ripe for additional healthy recipes. The winter’s a great time of the year, after all, to be experimenting with potatoes and other root vegetables…

9 January 2013 | cooking |