Puerto Rican Taters and a Madras

Puerto Rican Potato Salad!

I love this stuff. When you see what's in it, you'll love it too! What's not to love about bacon drippings?!

I call it Puerto Rican because where I used to work was very much a melting pot. One thing we all had in common was we loved to eat! We always had some kind of potluck going, and the most wonderful Indian, Mexican, Colombian, and Puerto Rican food was brought in. I loved the ethnic foods in particular. One young Puerto Rican girl always brought in her mother's famous potato salad. Giant pans of it. She would never tell us the secret ingredient, but after I left there (and they had a going-away potluck!) I decided to try to find out what the recipe was.

I went online and scoured tons of potato salad recipes, and puerto rican recipes. I found two that seemed to be the simplicity and ingredients I thought were in it. So I combined them for:

PUERTO RICAN POTATO SALAD

5 lbs potatoes

1 lb bacon, cooked, crumbled/torn, and grease/drippings reserved

1+ cups mayonnaise

1/2 medium white onion, chopped

salt, as needed

6 hard-cooked eggs, quartered into slivers

12 large pimiento-stuffed olives, halved

Boil potatoes whole. Cool slightly, then chop (peels and all). Put into bowl with bacon and onions. In another bowl mix mayo with 1/2 the bacon drippings (you can add the rest later if you so desire) until well mixed, then stir into the potato salad. If it seems too dry, add more mayo-drippings sauce. Salt to taste. Put into serving dish, and decorate the top with arrangement of the slivered eggs and olive halves. Serve warm for best taste, but you can eat it cold too!

Now, go jogging to clear your arteries back out! This feeds an army....
If you want, you can wash it down with my brother's famous drink:

DANNY'S MADRAS COCKTAIL

Fill a glass with ice. Then fill it 1/3 full with cranberry juice. Add another 1/3 full of orange juice. Then top it off with Captain Morgan's Spiced Rum. YUM! This is a rockin' drink for hot weather!!!

All this southern-type cooking at it's finest :D

Now, knitting content: I promised last weekend to show my yarny yield from unravelling a sweater. The fiber mix is ramie, wool, silk, nylon, and feels very 'dry' like cotton usually feels (I guess ramie is a by-product of cotton?) I loved the colors, but there's really nothing special or luxurious about this yarn. I thought I'd make some pillow-covers for my bed out of this. Here's what remained of the sweater after reclaiming the yarn:Now that's efficient!!!

And here is the yarn, hanging out to dry after a nice wash. Sunday I wound the yarn into balls.


I got 5 full balls of yarn out of this. It has an odd texture, and some pilling from all it's been through. I hope it's gonna be usable, otherwise it was just a training exercise in recycling :)