Speak and Spell Potato Salad

You say potato, I say potahto. We know that Dan Quayle can't spell potato(e). Should we call the whole thing off? I say not. Tasked with bringing summer salad to a BBQ recently, it occurred to me that I had never made anything so esoteric or ubiquitous as potato salad. I find it interesting that cooked potatoes and mayonnaise are so quintessentially American, yet French fries and mayo (a Belgian mainstay) is just not done. Anyway, I went straight to the book of knowledge (aka Gourmet Cookbook) and found the right answer. The recipe spoke to me and they're seemed to be no learning curve: boiled potatoes, hard boiled eggs, mayo, celery and onion. Now the Julia child balked at the notion of eggs - even though she likes egg salad.  Luckily, hers is not the only voice heard, and cooler taste buds (the question Mark and I) prevailed. I did tweak it a bit, reducing the mayo to 3/4 c instead of 1 and added a heaping tablespoon of Dijon mustard to give it a little kick of flavor. Oh, and I omitted the celery because the child h-a-t-e-esses it with a passion. The taste  you ask - it's spelled D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S.

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than the technology used to put a man on the moon, Speak and Spell by Texas Instruments, was a marvel when introduced at the Consumers Electronics Show in 1978. Before there were PCs, PDAs, cell and ultimately smart phones (and certainly spell check) there were really powerful calculators, digital watches and speech synthesis modules. Speak and Spell was the first educational toy to use speech, and not recorded sounds (the cow says moo) and launched the digital age of learning to spell. Originally programmed to help kids learn 200 of the most commonly misspelled (not mispelled) words, a digitized "voice" would pronounce the word and say each letter as it was input on the keyboard. Correct responses earned verbal and visual praise; wrong  answers received patient encouragement to try again, unlike traditional teacher/student or parent/child interaction. Speak and Spell was your friend (but not in a creepy way like Teddy Ruxpin). And, quite possibly, you could use it to communicate with Extra Terrestrials a la E.T. Of course, kids being kids, just spelling out the pre-programmed words wasn't enough. Making the module say alternative phrases was much more fun, and U-R-A-P-P  if you don't think that's humorous.

The Recipe:

2 pounds boiling potatoes (like Yukon Gold)
3 tblsp cider vinegar
1 tsp salt
3 hard boiled eggs, chopped
1 cup mayonnaise (now, I spelled it out differently: 3/4 cup mayo and 1 heaping tablespoon Dijon mustard)
fresh ground pepper, to taste

Combine potatoes with well-salted cold water to cover by 2 inches in a 3 qt pot. and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered until potatoes are tender, about 25 minutes. Drain and cool slightly. Meanwhile, whisk together vinegar and salt in a large bowl until salt is dissolved. When potatoes are just cool enough to handle. peel and cut into 1 inch pieces. adding to vinegar mixture as they are cut, tossing gently with a rubber spatula to coat. Cool to room temperature.Add eggs, mayo, mustard and salt and pepper to potatoes and stir gently to combine. Serves 6 chilled.