Today I nearly cried over potato salad. Yes, it’s true. A bit dramatic, but true. As you can imagine, cooking in a foreign country (especially of the Third World) is quite a chore and can be a very frustrating experience, thus the tears. I was assigned to bring potato salad to our staff meeting this week and I decided that since I had made potato salad with my mother so many times in the States, it couldn’t be that hard here and eagerly accepted the challenge. Oh, such a naïve girl. When will I learn that not EVERYTHING has to be an adventure? Probably never. Anyway, after looking for ingredients over the course of a week in four grocery stores and finally scrounging up what I thought could make potato salad, I purchased a kilo of potatoes (see the related veggie stand post) and headed home. Do you know how many potatoes are in a kilo of potatoes? I didn’t either apparently. I just thought, everyone buys a kilo of everything, that should be fine. I now have seven very small potatoes in which to somehow produce potato salad for a fairly large group of people. Where was my conversion calculator when I needed it? Too bad I didn’t notice this until AFTER I got home and in all honesty, I just didn’t want to go all the way back to the veggie stand, braving the streets, especially at night. After soaking the potatoes in a Clorox mixture for a while as we do with all produce (to kill all those little critters that I don’t even want to know are on my food- although I’m not really sure how safe it is to ingest Clorox…definitely NOT organic), I decided to boil them before peeling them (for safe measure). So I turned on our gas stove (which exploded, yes, exploded, on my roommate the other day, but that’s another story for another day…don’t worry, she escaped with only minor injuries and a hair-less arm) and proceeded to boil the potatoes. Oh wait, I must have forgotten that our can of natural gas located next to our stove was almost empty. Can’t use the stove without gas! I was beginning to feel a bit frustrated. Why don’t I ever volunteer to bring drinks or something simple? Why do I have to feel so Martha Stewart all the time? At this point I had no idea what to do so I just let the potatoes sit, thinking that maybe the steam would cook them. I began gathering all of the other ingredients I needed and fortunately, my roommate had a plethora of spices, probably sent from the States. After substituting several items and leaving others out altogether, I wondered if what I was making was actually potato salad after all. The good news is, the potatoes did cook almost all the way through and I added them to the, uh, mixture and somehow decided that it would probably pass for potato salad and was worthy of being served at the meeting. The next day I sheepishly placed it alongside other dishes that looked like Emeril himself had prepared them. How do these people do that?! Surprisingly, I did receive several compliments on my “creation” but I think that will be the last time I attempt that recipe here. It might take a while before I re-gain my courage to try anything more difficult than Ramen noodles (which, luckily, they DO have here).