improvising

When it comes to cooking, my mother is the queen of making ordinary food taste gourmet. The grocery stores in my hometown don’t exactly carry a ton of fancy ingredients – that’s even an understatement. I went grocery shopping with her once (see story below) and couldn’t even find extra virgin olive oil. My Dad doesn’t really mind, as he is a notoriously ‘standard meat and potatoes’ kind of guy, and the simple ingredients are just fine by him. But my mom…she is a cook. She has stacks of cookbooks, note cards, clippings and more recipes in her head than Betty Crocker herself, and likes to try new recipes when she gets the chance. Sometimes she enlists me in the task of trying out these new recipes, with no fair warning of what I am up against…

On a visit home last summer, my mom planned to have a very nice meal with chicken, vegetables and a new recipe: French Potato Salad, from Ina Garten (The Barefoot Contessa). I honestly can’t remember the other dishes, hence the very descriptive “chicken and vegetables,” because the star of this meal was the potato salad. My mom decided that she wanted to try this recipe out, and handed the task over to me while she prepared the rest of the meal. As I went through the ingredients I asked my mom if she had everything on hand, as I knew that the potatoes were about the only sure bet. She said she had prepared for this by getting some fresh herbs at the store. That was a good start – we’d need them. As she looked over the rest of the list she said she had everything. Okay. Time to get to work. I began to get everything out of the pantry.

Me: “Where’s the dry white wine?”
Mom: “Oh, I don’t have any. How about this?”

From the refrigerator, my mom pulled an opened bottle of cheap, sparkling white wine.

Me: “Mom…that’s not exactly dry white wine. What about extra virgin olive oil?”
Mom: “Umm...I have vegetable oil?”
Me: “…now I know you don’t have Champagne vinegar…”
Mom: “Oh, no….but I have white vinegar!”
Me: “We need to run to the store.”

So, I asked my mom to look through the ingredients and make a list of what we needed to buy. We could substitute things if necessary, but since we have a market right down the road, might as well try to get the correct things, right? Right. Or not.

We were in the store and I couldn’t believe my eyes. A veritable wall of oils and not one container of extra virgin olive oil. Not one! The best we could manage was a “light olive oil.” I soon had no expectations of finding Champagne vinegar or anything close to it, and since they don’t sell wine in Maryland grocery stores, we were out of luck with the dry white wine too. Back home we went.

Back in the kitchen I continued to pull out the rest of the ingredients, sure that my mom would have everything else on the list. After all, she said she did.

Me: “Umm, where is the Dijon mustard?”
Mom: “Won’t honey mustard work, too?”

Oh boy. This was gonna be good.

So, instead of having a potato salad with:

Red and white boiling potatoes
Good dry white wine
Chicken stock
Champagne vinegar
Dijon mustard
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
Good olive oil
Scallions
Fresh dill
Flat-leaf parsley
Fresh basil

We had potato salad with:

White potatoes
Cheap sparkling wine
Chicken bullion
Cider vinegar mixed with sparkling wine
Honey mustard
Regular salt and pepper
Light, refined olive oil
Vidalia onion
Fresh dill
Flat-leaf parsley
Fresh basil

And you know what? It was delicious. I’ll go a step further than that – it was the best potato salad I’ve ever had. I’ll never doubt my mother again (shh, but don’t tell her that).

Despite a lack of ‘fancy’ ingredients on hand, my mom can always make a recipe work – even if that means changing it completely. She keeps it simple, uses what she has on hand, tries to please the people she’s feeding and somehow, it always seems to come together in the end.

Go here for Ina Garten’s original recipe, but if you trust your instincts and make it your own, it will turn out just fine. I don’t think Ina will mind.