From Scratch: Daring Cooks' Challenge: Healthy Potato Salad

Jami Sorrento was our June Daring Cooks hostess and she chose to challenge us to celebrate the humble spud by making a delicious and healthy potato salad. The Daring Cooks Potato Salad Challenge was sponsored by the nice people at the United States Potato Board, who awarded prizes to the top 3 most creative and healthy potato salads. A medium-size (5.3 ounce) potato has 110 calories, no fat, no cholesterol, no sodium and includes nearly half your daily value of vitamin C and has more potassium than a banana!

I usually think of a potato salad as a creamy mess, but after this challenge, i realized i could use some other dressing other than nasty mayonnaise (sorry folks, i'm not too crazy about mayo). i had alot of fun coming up with ideas on what to put in my salad and the colors of the veggies were so pretty together :]

Ingredients

onions

red bell peppers

cucumbers

yellow squash

carrots

thyme

dill

two garlic cloves

and colorful fingerling potatoes! (from the Berkeley Bowl..thank you Andrew!!)

for the asian-western vinaigrette:

3 parts balsamic vinegar

1 part soybean/sesame oil

couple drops of soy sauce

boil the potatoes until soft

meanwhile, crush the two cloves of garlic to put in a low-heated saucepan filled with a 1/2 cup of olive oil.

then add some dill and thyme into the olive oil. heat this up for a little, just so the thyme, dill, and garlic can give flavor to the olive oil.

take the potatoes out of the water once a fork can be easily inserted into one of them

then peel the potatoes!

while the potatoes are still warm, pour the olive oil onto the potatoes and mix. this gives such great flavor to the taters :]

i decided to steam my vegetables!

for the vinaigrette, i just added 3 teaspoons of soybean/sesame oil and 1 teaspoon of balsamic vinegar (only because i only had a tiny bit of soybean/sesame oil left..so there wasn't really alot of vinaigrette in my potato salad)