Recipe

She stared at the little red lumps in the orange bowl. They were potatoes, but they weren't the kind of potatoes her mother had always used.

She wondered if that would ruin everything.

Probably not, right? Potatoes were pretty much potatoes, weren't they? Surely using little red potatoes instead of big brown ones couldn't possibly ruin everything. Surely not.

She sighed and grabbed one, put it under the running water, and scrubbed it vigorously with her long-sought-after, finally-attained, jealously-guarded vegetable scrub brush. Her husband had once tried to use it to wash dishes: that had not ended well.

Once the potatoes were all cleaned she set them aside and turned to her next obstacle: oil and vinegar. The problem with trying to recreate her mother's recipes (which were actually her grandmother's recipes) was that they weren't written down, and they weren't exact. It was all, "and then you add this and that until the texture/taste/consistency is right," which was fine if you'd been making something for thirty years, but less useful if you'd only ever been on the eating end of the equation.

"Right," she muttered. "Oil first," and she poured about a quarter cup into her measuring cup. Surely that would be enough- she only had about a dozen of those little potatoes, after all. She shook the vinegar on top of it, watching the level rise to just shy of a half cup. More oil than vinegar, that sounded good... she added a dash of Maggi, then a dash more.

Three minutes were wasted as she hunted down her mini-whisk, which was not where it was supposed to be, and also not in the other place it shouldn't be but might understandably be, but then it turned out that it was where it was supposed to be, it's just that someone had put it away upside down.

(She suspected the someone might have been herself, but one can't be held responsible for what one does first thing in the morning before one even has breakfast...)

She whisked the mixture, then dipped a pinky in to taste. She was pretty sure it needed more vinegar, but she figured she'd double check with the man who had requested the dish in the first place. "Hey hon, will you taste this?" Her husband wandered into the kitchen, gave her a dubious look as she held out the measuring cup, but gamely dipped in a finger and brought it to his tongue.

"I think it needs more vinegar," he said in the tone of voice that meant he didn't feel totally qualified to give such opinions, and was doing so only because she was giving him an Imploring Look.

"I thought so, too."

She added more vinegar, then set the mixture aside, along with the potatoes. Her husband, offering his help, was put to chopping up green onions while she transferred the potatoes into the now boiling, slightly salted water and set the timer for twenty minutes. Definitely not long enough, but she was paranoid about them getting too mushy.

In the end she kept them in for twenty-five minutes, then used a fork to rescue them one-by-one and put them on the cutting board. The water she'd boiled them in she set off to the side for later. Then began the long and painful process of peeling boiling-hot potatoes. She decided that one benefit to using the little reds was that they didn't hold the heat so well as the large brown ones, which meant that as she made her way through the small pile it started to hurt less. Or maybe she'd just done enough nerve damage to her fingers that it seemed that way.

Once they were all peeled and quartered she dumped them in a bowl, added a bit of the boiled-water to her oil-and vinegar mix, muttered a little invocation and poured it over the potatoes. Salt and pepper came next, then green onions, then she tossed everything together by hand. Her mom never did it by hand, but she liked tossing things that way- it gave her a better feel for whatever it was she was cooking or baking. Now for a taste-test...

The reds hadn't ruined anything, so that was good, but they definitely needed more of both salt and pepper.

"Hon, will you add more salt and pepper?" she held up her oily hands as an excuse, then said, "When!" after he'd added enough of each. She tossed the concoction again, tasted again, and finally allowed him a taste.

"Oh yeah," he said. "That's awesome." She smiled and washed her hands.

It wasn't until later that she was truly convinced she'd done it right, however. She'd gone out on the porch to keep him company while he grilled the brats, then decided that such a scene demanded a cold beer for each of them. She opened the door to go back into the house-

And stopped, grinning. Because when she'd inhaled just now, as she'd walked into the house, it hadn't smelled like her house- it smelled like her grandmother's. It smelled like good German cooking.