Do you like salads?
I have tried to like salads – and there are a few that I enjoy. I love most pasta salads. I enjoy a good chopped salad. But honestly? I have been to restaurants before and ordered, let’s say a fried chicken salad. I really wanted to say, “I’d like the fried chicken salad, but I don’t want the spinach or lettuce. I just want a bowl with all the other stuff. The fried chicken, the cheese, the nuts, the chunks of blue cheese…”
Basically I don’t want the part of the salad that makes it good for you.
One salad I have loved (in its entirety) since my childhood is potato salad. I don’t like it if it’s too mustard-y or if it’s swimming in mayonnaise. But I love potato salad.
My mama always makes a creamy, smooth potato mixture and then adds chopped hard boiled eggs, onions, and dill pickle relish. She adds mayonnaise, mustard, salt, and pepper. It is yummy and still one of my favorite potato salads.
This is my potato salad. I leave it chunky and then add green onions, cream cheese and sour cream, and BACON!
Bacon really does make the world go round.
Warm Bacon Potato Salad
- 3 pounds of small, red potatoes, cut into bite-sized chunks
- 1 8-ounce package of cream cheese
- 1 cup of sour cream
- 6 green onions, white and green parts thinly sliced
- 1 teaspoon of salt
- 10 slices bacon, cooked crisp and cut or crumbled
Place potato pieces into a pot and fill with water, covering the potatoes by an inch. Add a couple of teaspoons of salt to the water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Boil until potatoes are fork tender, about 15 minutes. Drain.
While potatoes are cooking, in a large bowl, microwave cream cheese for 1 1/2 minutes. Remove from the oven and use a whisk to make sure the cream cheese is creamy. Add sour cream and whisk together. Add the salt and the green onions.
When potatoes are done, use a wooden spoon or rubber spatula to add them to the cream cheese mixture, making sure to completely cover all of the potatoes with the mixture. Stir in the bacon pieces. Top with additional green onion slices, if desired. Serve warm.
Well Duh #1: If you use cream cheese that has softened to room temperature, you will still need to microwave it for about 30 seconds to make sure it combines well with the cold sour cream.
Well Duh #2: “Fork tender” just means that when you poke the potatoes with a fork, it slides in easily with no resistance. Cooking your potatoes a little longer won’t hurt anything. Your chunks will just break up a little more when you stir them. Err to the side of softer potatoes. You want the potatoes to break up a little when you stir them. That adds to the creaminess of the dish. Undercooked potatoes will KILL this dish! Dead.
Well Duh #3: I cooked my bacon in the oven. There are a bazillion methods to do this all over the internet. You can Google it. If you’re not in a Googling mood, here’s what I did this time: Preheat your oven to 400 degrees. Cover a large baking sheet with foil. Lay strips of bacon onto the foil. Bake for 15 minutes. Drain bacon on paper towels. I’ve done it at several different temperatures and cooking times. It turns out great. Lots of bacon with minimal work. No babysitting it in a skillet.
I love the creaminess and flavor of this potato salad. I also love that it doesn’t have mayonnaise in it. We had it on National Fried Chicken Day earlier this week. Elizabeth doesn’t eat “chicken on the bone,” so she actually ate a big bowl of potato salad for dinner! She was very happy with that! I won’t say I didn’t still fish around and find all the bacon in my serving, but I will say that even after I found all the bacon, I still ate the rest of the potato salad!
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