New Potato Salad (and patties yet again)

On account of me doing a fairly believable impression of an industrious student over the past months there hasn’t been much time for food blogs (or eating proper food for that matter). Yes, I’m doing two posts with ground meat in a row, but today the protein is playing second fiddle to the salad.

When I’m shopping for groceries on auto pilot, I tend to follow the motto ‘when in doubt – patties’ which is why we’re having that again. But as I’ve said before, there’s endless possibilities for variation (which makes using garlic and parsley as the main seasoning again a bit silly of course).

Summer is almost upon us and the new potatoes have hit the stores. A week ago a pound of new potatoes grown in Sweden cost you your firstborn and a kidney, but today they were down to SEK 14.90 per kilo (about £1.30 or 2 US dollars). The main task for Swedish new potatoes is to keep the pickled herring from falling off the plate, but I wanted to play around a bit and decided on a salad. Even remembered to do some sort of lineup.

Here we have some rocket (or arugula), button mushrooms, a cheese that was cheap but seems to be the result of an affair between a proper feta cheese and a box of erasers (nothing wrong with the actual taste though), olive oil, balsamic vinegar, new potatoes, ground meat, olives, garlic, cucumber and leek.

Start with the patties. About a pound of ground meat (50/50 beef and pork), an egg, a dollop of tomato paste, a pinch of salt, some frozen parsley, a generous helping of black pepper and an industrial amount of crushed garlic. Mix thoroughly and set aside for later.

Potatoes all scrubbed and cut up and put in water with salt and a couple of cloves of garlic.

This is what a closeup photo of a vinaigrette looks like. Oil, balsamic vinegar, salt, pepper, dried thyme, sage and tarragon. Later, when the potatoes are cooked, mash the garlic from that pot and stir it into the dressing. before tipping the actual salad in.

I suspect that I’ve been watching Jamie Oliver a bit too much lately. I usually pile stuff up neatly on the cutting board for photos. Not so much this time, since summer food is usually about getting everything chopped up and thrown together before the dinner guests in the garden have guzzled down the whole bag-in-box. But this is about as rustic as I can manage, because I like my neat piles and julienned carrots.

Next it’s time to pat the patties into shape. Making eight patties from 575 grams of mixture, serving two per person is just about right with such a rich salad.

A proper barbecue is of course preferred, but since I don’t have one, the grill pan will have to do.

Salad put together and tossed. I don’t think I’ve ever sprinkled cheese crumbles over a salad before, so I obviously need to lay off the Jamie Oliver shows…

Also, my photography skills are obviously a bit rusty. A horrendously off-target photo like this wouldn’t usually make it to the blog, but I only took one frame of the assembled dish. It’s still tasty though.