Exploring Potato Salad

In my experience, potato salad is an oddly, intensely personal dish.  The dressings and garnishes are perfected and then passed down through generations.  My mom makes a "famous" potato salad with hard-boiled eggs, Miracle Whip, and scallions.  My mother-in-law uses Hellman's mayo and pickles.

I love my mom's potato salad because I grew up with it, but I'm also potato-curious... I like to experiment!  So the other night I finally got around to trying this "decadent" potato salad in HTCEV.  Anything with cream cheese as an ingredient is going to be appealing to me.

 

That's a lot of fish.  A lot of deliciously seasoned fish, if I do say so myself.  The potato salad, though... well, it was strange.  It went over really well at dinner... but it was so rich that there were a lot of leftovers, and no one has touched them yet.  It seemed to be much more appealing as a warm dish, which I think kind of goes against the spirit of a potato "salad."  I can't believe I'm saying this, but my final judgment was that this potato salad was too creamy even for me.  In fact, the entire experience of eating it seemed to be about the cream; it didn't really have any other flavors.  I love me some dairy fat, but not to the extent that I'm just going to open up the cream cheese tub and dig in with my spoon -- and that's kind of what this was like.  If you'd have no problem eating a stick of butter if it was socially acceptable, I get it... and if you want, I'll email you the recipe for this.  As for me, I'm going to try something with a mustard dressing next time.

UPDATE: it turns out that John finally rediscovered the potato salad last night while I was at my weekly track workout, and it was apparently still good enough that it ran out before he and Ben got their fill.  Good to know, but I still don't think this one was for me.