Grilled Potato Salad with Vinaigrette

My husband claims it's my German heritage, but I have never met a potato that I didn't love! (He's more of a rice man himself, but we both agree on the fabulousness of pasta.) A week or two ago I had some lovely fingerling potatoes in my farm box and figured they'd be delicious in potato salad. I turned to my new favorite cookbook, Mark Bittman's How To Cook Everything and prepared his Grilled Potato Salad, with a Vinaigrette also inspired by the book.

The best part about the HTCE book is that in addition to the hundreds of recipes, Bittman also has lots of charts and tables with options for varying each type of recipe. You are free to branch out as much as you'd like, but he is there providing structure to advise and support you. This potato salad was a perfect case in point.

Making this simple dish (and it was simple) involved flipping among 3 different recipes/methods in the book:

1) his instructions for potato salad, choosing the grilled version

2) his method of grilling potatoes, using the broiled version

3) his recipe for vinaigrette, where I loosely combined many of the optional ingredients that he lists (my version is detailed in the notes, below)

n.o.e.'s notes:

- My potatoes were small red fingerlings.

- To cook the potatoes, I tossed them with olive oil, salt and pepper, and broiled them 6" from a medium-high broiler for 12 minutes then turned and broiled 10 more minutes.

- Here's the approximate vinaigrette that I made (did not use all for my 1/2 pound of potatoes):

3T olive oil
2 T white wine vinegar
1/2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp black pepper
3/4 tsp chopped garlic
1 T chopped spring onion
1 T fluffy parmesan from microplane

- I shook the vinaigrette and poured it over potatoes while they were hot. Then I sprinkled the salad with a couple sprigs of chopped Italian parsley and oregano, stirring until coated.

- I cooled the salad before serving.

- Sorry about the picture; I did not take a good shot of the salad itself before we ate it all!

the verdict:

This was a nice, simple, fresh way to enjoy new potatoes in the early summer! I love having a simple recipe like this in my arsenal, and I love the flexibility it provided me to use what I had on hand and produce a lovely salad.