I know this story is about potato salad but your telling about the one who would bring in the container of store bought triggered a memory from when my children were junior highers.

We were hosting the Thanksgiving dinner for three families of relatives. The children and I stayed up until 2:00 a.m. making pies. We had every pie you could think of. Coconut cream, pumpkin, pecan, lemon meringue and I'm probably forgetting some.

Imagine my children's shock (and the rolled eyes) when all of the women that were invited walked in with frozen pies from their grocery store.

Rock on, homemade food! Teach your children young and they will grow up doing the right thing.

(sigh) Salon: stop unleasing your new interns to write fake troll letters just to spice the letters to the editor so we normal folk log more "hit" time. Those of us who have been around the block can smell a manufactured later from a Minnesota mile.

A big German bear hup to jjoanna for the recipe.

Lacking a sense of proportion, are we?

And any sense of sanity I hope, in line with the American public discourse on the matter.

While I disagree that prosecution of the Bushies should be off the table, I agree with Garrison Keillor's right to believe that for his own reasons.

Well of course his right to his opinion is so much more important than any right a prisoner has to not be tortured isn't it. After all he's an American whilst a foreigner in American custody has all the rights of a stick insect that they so closely resemble after being put on a "intense nutrition management program" isn't he.

If you are truly from London, then work to ensure that YOUR government does not go to war for no frickin' good reason again.

I'll do that. It worked out so well the last time two and a half million of us marched in Hyde Park.

Seating my new senator, Al Franken, is a start.

Should have given George Galloway a ring. He could have shown you how to deal with Coleman a great deal faster.

And BTW: Happy 4th of July!

And I'm sure the sentiment is returned to you from the detainees being held in a variety of stress positions as we speak in Bagram. As well as from the couple in the cell next door with broomsticks up their asses, the one who can't come to the phone right now because he's strapped to a board with a pint of Evian up his nose and the one locked in a small box who is looking forward to some potato salad being poured through the hole to join him and the insects on that finest of fine days, the Fourth of July.

Lacking a sense of proportion, are we? While I disagree that prosecution of the Bushies should be off the table, I agree with Garrison Keillor's right to believe that for his own reasons.

That said, believing that they ought not to be prosecuted != agreeing with them about torture, or the war, or any other damn thing. Get over yourself, please. If you are truly from London, then work to ensure that YOUR government does not go to war for no frickin' good reason again.

I'll do what I can, here to ensure the same thing. Seating my new senator, Al Franken, is a start. And BTW: Happy 4th of July!

So Prosecute Bush, grow up and join the adults while we have our little holiday and remember what it all really means, that families and societies are more important than who or what government is doing.

Uhhhh-are you saying that critcizing a celebrity for supporting torure is not adult? And what about the families and societies we are bombing and torturing? Don't they count.

This little holiday you refer to-Independence Day simply highlights the hypocrisy of this country and what monsters we have become. When torturers and manstream entertainers who support them can hold their heads up in polite society we are in deep fucking trouble.

PS-special note to agore-go fuck yourself you dumbass-you and the folks at Fox must be the only new consumers aroubd not to know that the vast majority of detainees tortured by the good old USA are innocent.

political speech is one thing, do you expect us all to sit around in silence if we don't yell about bush's crime??

Otherwise this is a good piece, for where it is. Did you all miss the lovely messages with their own potato salad recipes?? This is non-political discourse. It made me want to try some of the recipes even though my own recipe is a really good one that converts everyone who tastes it. And Garrison is so right, we need to show people what real food is so that they will stop buying that slop from the big companies. Is there anything more rebellious or democratic than that??? So Prosecute Bush, grow up and join the adults while we have our little holiday and remember what it all really means, that families and societies are more important than who or what government is doing.

A Minnesota man, born and bred, and you neglect to mention (from The Betty Crocker Cookbook, circa 1946, one of my mother's wedding presents) the part about marinating the potatoes in French dressing.

Actually I think Keillor prefers his potatoes marinated in blood drenched urine from a recently beaten detainee freshly flown in from Cuba with a fine cigar from the same place to follow afterwards.

It's time to stand up for homemade potato salad.
(But not time to stand up against torture.)

Come on, people, it's not that hard to make (the choice). Do you really think we can't tell the difference?

Where I live you can buy hard boiled eggs by the carton in the grocery store. If someone can't be bothered to boil an egg they for sure won't be making potato salad.

of hands' on time. Anybody who has routinely cooked for a family knows that the time invested in preparing food has two pieces. One is the time it takes, start to finish. It could be hours, if it's soup or stew, nearly a full day, if it's loaves of whole grain bread.

The other is the time that one actually spends preparing the stuff. Potatoes peel FAST when they're cooked, and chop faster, too. With an egg slicer, it's amazing how quickly you can slice a half dozen eggs for a huge potato salad. Might be a little longer than a half hour, all told. But not much.

But damn, now I'm not only hungry for potato salad, but deviled eggs.