Who doesn't love potato salad? We're making a recipe that was mentioned on our Facebook group (COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK) by a listener: potato, pasta, a combo of potato and macaroni salad. A great treat.

We're Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough, authors of three dozen (and counting!) cookbooks (not counting the ones ghost-written for celebs--now there are some stories.) This is our podcast about our food and cooking passion . . . and mostly about potatoes this time around.

Here are the segments for this episode of COOKING WITH BRUCE & MARK:

[00:39] Our one-minute cooking tip: store potatoes in a cool, dark place at room temperature.

[01:50] We're making potato salad with pasta, a U. S. Midwestern (and elsewhere!) classic. Here's the recipe:

Start with 1 1/2 pounds (675 grams) VERY SMALL yellow potatoes, boiled in a Dutch oven with lots of water for 7 minutes. (Or larger potatoes, cut into 2-inch (1-centimeter) pieces.

Add 1/2 pound (225 grams) dried small elbow macaroni. Cook until both are tender, about 5 more minutes.

Drain in a colander set in the sink. Cool just a few minutes, then whisk together this dressing in a serving bowl: 3/4 cup (155 grams) mayonnaise, 1/4 cup (60 ml) apple cider vinegar, 2 tablespoons (30 grams) pickle relish, 2 teaspoons (10 grams) Dijon mustard, 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon ground black pepper, 1/2 teaspoon onion powder, and 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder.

Stir in the warm potatoes, pasta, 2 cups (360 grams) corn kernels and 4 thinly sliced celery stalks. If desired, top with 2 or 3 hard-cooked eggs, peeled and sliced. Just FYI, the salad tastes better when cold. Cover and refrigerate for at least 4 hours or overnight.

[13:47] What’s making us happy in food this week: cherimoya and rhubarb pie!

Hey, I'm Bruce Weinstein, and this is the podcast Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And I'm Mark Skarbrow, and together with Bruce, we have written three

dozen cookbooks, have now turned into three dozen and one cookbook.

It's, uh, well, gonna be a lot of talk about that upcoming, but this is

our podcast about food and cooking, our major passions in our life.

And to that end, we've got a one minute cooking tip about potatoes.

We're going to be making potato salad in this episode of the day.

Take a look.

podcast based on a comment someone made in the Facebook group Cooking with Bruce

and Mark, and we'll tell you what's making us happy in food this week.

It's a potato show.

So let's get started.

Our one minute cooking tip.

Never store your potatoes on the counter where you can see them all the time,

because that means light is hitting them.

When light hits your potatoes, they turn green.

They have

a chlorophyll like reaction.

Um, you actually can eat the green stuff.

I know it doesn't look really good.

You can eat a little of it.

If you eat very much of it, though, you will get a stomach ache.

It's unadvisable to eat it.

If you see it, cut it out.

And let's just say that at the supermarket, Carrot.

The potatoes are stored at room temperature.

So take your cue from there.

Yeah.

At the supermarket.

They also throw a blanket over the potatoes at night because all of those

fluorescent lights they keep on will in fact, turn those potatoes green.

So they cover them.

You should do the same at home.

You should.

Okay, before we get to making potato salad, let me say that as I've

already indicated, there is a Facebook group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

You might want to check that out.

You can find us on social media under our own names.

There's even a TikTok channel, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, where you can

find us making recipes for each other.

Check all of those ways that you can connect with us on social media.

Okay, we're going to make potato salad.

Every week, we ask you to share what's making you Happy in food on our Facebook

group and cooking with Bruce and Mark.

And this week Sandy did, and she, a lot of people did, but Sandy

had something really interesting.

She said it was her mother in law's potato salad made with

pasta, fresh corn and eggs.

And I actually thought that was really unusual.

I'm told by my husband sitting across from me that it's actually

not as unusual as I thought.

You know, Bruce, first of all, um, uh, uh, when I was in the Midwest in grad

school, I had a lot of potato salads with, uh, macaroni or pasta in them.

It's like a potato salad, uh, macaroni salad cross.

But eggs?

Yes, I grew up with hard boiled eggs and potato salad.

I grew up in the South.

Okay.

So, that is a totally normal thing in my book.

I'll get

slammed for this, but I don't think it's a Jewish thing.

Um, no, I don't think it is either.

In Jewish delis, you don't have hard boiled eggs in potato salad,

but, uh, it's a very southern thing.

I don't really know where that came from, but my grandmother

used to put them in potato salad.

So it's like

egg salad, and macaroni salad, and pasta salad.

The potato salad.

All in one.

All in one.

So we're doing that.

So what you hear at the moment is a big pot boiling away, and in that

pot is one and a half pounds or 675 grams of very small yellow potatoes.

Oh, these things are tiny, like walnuts.

We're smaller.

Yeah, you want to find that Yukon gold and then instead of buying

them already packaged picked through the bin of them and find the

smallest ones you can and have them.

Um, I just to tell you, if you don't know years ago, we wrote a book,

the ultimate potato book and book in which it's all about potatoes.

And we've got lots of potato cells in that book of French potato, green beans, right?

Oh,

The German is my favorite with bacon and onions.

I mean, what, what's not to like with bacon and all that bacon fat

becomes part of the dressings.

And then a nice was potato salad with olives and fresh tuna.

We have really good

potatoes, smoked salmon, and in there we do have potato salad with pasta in it.

It is common thing.

I, I swear, I probably asked for it in the book from my days in the Midwest.

Okay.

So we've had this thing boiling these potatoes boiling for seven minutes, right?

And so now.

We're going to add a half pound or 225 grams of small elbow macaroni.

You can use gluten free, um, you can use, uh, any kind of macaroni you

want, even a whole wheat macaroni.

It'll just take a little longer to cook.

And this is a great thing.

You can boil them together.

We give the potatoes a head start, seven minutes, and they were

not quite tender, but almost.

So I figured the five to seven minutes at the elbow macaroni will

take, we'll finish them off quickly.

perfectly.

And while that cooks, we could talk some more about potatoes.

So

potatoes began their life.

If you don't know this, they're, they're horticultural life high in

the Andes, and they were a staple crop among South American cultures

before the colonizers arrived.

They are, um, bad.

They bear no resemblance to what is now called a potato.

The closest thing.

you could come are the modern blue potatoes, but even

that has been hybridized.

I

love blue potatoes, although I think they're more purple than they are blue.

Yeah, it depends.

Some of them are purple, violet.

They spread really quickly.

Potatoes did as a staple crop through the Incan cultures all

up into Central America even.

And then when Conquistadors and the Spanish arrived, they brought

the potatoes back to Europe.

Uh, you should tell you, if you don't know this, that they brought

them back as a curiosity because the theory was, just let me have this.

I know it's kind of gross, but let me have this.

The theory was that the indigenous peoples of the Americas were devil worshipers

and potatoes grew in the ground.

And so the devil was under the ground.

So this is the food they ate.

So they brought it back as this curiosity of like, you know,

devil food from under the ground.

And

no one ate them.

They brought them back and everyone was afraid to eat them.

Like Rosemary's baby, you can't eat the potatoes.

The brave soul probably, you know, set in to eat a potato.

And then that did that.

I wonder what the first potato eaten.

Was it boiled?

Was it roasted?

Maybe it

was air fried.

Yeah, sure.

With the electricity in 1500's Europe.

Didn't

you grow up like I did where your grandmother told you if you ate

raw potatoes you'd get worms?

No.

We were always told don't eat raw potatoes.

You get worms.

No, I

didn't we didn't eat raw potatoes Well, I grew up going to my grandparents.

Well, actually my great grandparents farm In the summers and I grew up there

a lot in the summers It's I was outside of Oklahoma City in what is now Yukon,

Oklahoma, which is a city suburb of Oklahoma City, but at the time it was all

farmland, and my great grandparents had a farm out there and all the family kind

of decamped that house for the summer.

And my job was tending the potato patch and I hated it because that

potato patch was full of snakes.

Oh, you loved snakes.

you, full up of snakes.

You loved snakes.

No, and I still do.

kid I really hated them.

I hated even going in that.

It was about an acre of potatoes.

It was for the family.

It wasn't a commercial venture.

It was just growing potatoes for the family.

And, uh, I was so afraid to go in there and weed and water that potato.

I would stand on the edges of it with throwing buckets of water over.

Potatoes.

I think your

grandmother's a genius, though, because you told me she's kept

cold boiled potatoes in salt in a crock in the kitchen.

She did.

She would

boil potatoes, cool them, and then pack them in salt in a crock.

That sounds so delicious, I would probably weigh 8, 000 more pounds than I do.

Any time

that you wanted anything to eat, she'd always say, go get a potato.

out of that crock under the sink that was just kind of a thing,

a snack in the early afternoon.

It's probably why I grew up snacking on salty things and not sweet things.

Okay.

Anyway, we're done with our pasta and our potatoes, so we're going to drain

it in a colander set in the sink.

Oh, I can tell you about that in a minute.

Well, all right.

I'm going to drain it.

Mark can tell you the story while I do this.

Yeah.

The story

here is that you have to be really explicit when you write cookbooks.

people have been known.

to drain things in colanders and the water goes all over the counter because you

didn't say in the cookbook, set it in the sink, so thus my insistence on what to do.

Okay, so it's been drained.

And I usually like to dress potato and macaroni salads while everything's

hot because it absorbs the dressing.

But not when I'm using mayonnaise.

There's something gross to me about eating a mayonnaise.

Yeah, it should

be, in my opinion, mayonnaise dressing on potatoes, it should go on warm

potatoes but not hot potatoes.

So,

I am going to take a cue from the great British baking show.

And if you ever notice when they take their cakes out of the oven and they

have to frost them in two minutes, they start fanning them with cutting boards.

So I am fanning these potatoes with a plastic cutting board.

And I'm going to keep doing this while Mark mixes up the next batch.

bit of the salad.

Okay, so it's a mayonnaise dressing.

So I've got three quarters of a cup or 155 grams of mayonnaise.

You can use low fat.

You can use fat free.

You can use avocado oil mayonnaise.

We're

using avocado oil.

You made me buy that when we were in Costco.

I did.

I like it a lot.

So use any kind of mayonnaise you want.

I've also got a quarter cup or 60 ml of apple cider vinegar, and two

tablespoons or 30 grams of peanut butter.

pickle relish, two teaspoons or 10 grams of Dijon mustard, a teaspoon

of salt, teaspoon of pepper, a little bit less of onion powder

and way less of garlic powder.

So if you want to find this recipe, it's going to come out

probably in our newsletter.

So you don't have to copy all this down.

I'm just making a basic mayonnaise, apple cider vinegar dressing.

And the key kick here is adding a little pickle relish and a little Dijon mustard.

And I put Put out the sweet pickle relish for you to use on this, not the

dill, because I wanted this to be sweet.

Yeah, okay.

So, uh, now we've got that, and we've got two cups of corn kernels.

So, uh, how'd you get these kernels?

I opened a can, and I drained them, a 15 ounce can.

But, you can use frozen and thawed.

You can even cut, Corn kernels right off the cob and throw them in.

Because did you know that corn is the only whole grain you can eat raw, right?

And it's natural state

only whole grain that humans can eat raw cows or another matter.

Let me say this about that.

If you don't like eating raw corn or the idea of it, but you want fresh.

Cut your kernels off the cobs and put them in the colander.

That way, when you pour the hot potatoes and pasta over

them, they will cook in that.

Yeah, yeah.

We have a whole set of recipes in our book, The Kitchen Shortcut Bible, in which

basically we call it colander cooking.

And you put things in a colander, you bring pasta to a boil on the

stove, you cook it, and then you pour it into the colander and it cooks.

He cooks what's in the colander from the heat of the water and the heat of

the, the noodles, you know, sitting on top of what's in the colander.

It's a whole thing we came up with in colander cooking.

Okay.

So anyway, we got the corn and now we got four stalks of celery and that's

very thinly sliced and Bruce is going to now, uh, fix in the potatoes, right?

I'm going to

pour those over the top and then here's what Bruce is going to do

because Bruce likes to do this.

He's snapping on his surgical gloves.

Oh, and he's going to mix this up with his hands because I would

rather use my hands than a spoon So I know it's all blended up good.

And plus it feels good.

It sounds oh, and it sounds good.

Oh We're not that kind of podcast So now it's all getting mixed up

and I'm kind of revolted by it But um, he's got his hands in there.

You should see this.

He's got black latex gloves on it's really kind of Wild.

Um, anyway, we're not that kind of show.

So, um, so once this is all mixed together, Bruce has got two hard

boiled eggs that he made earlier.

They're peeled.

I'm going to slice these and put them on top.

You're not going to stir them

in and make it, make it like egg salad.

Well, that's

what my grandmother would do, but we're going to be fancy and we're just going

to slice these and put it all over.

Okay.

That's the real way to do it.

Scoop it up.

We'll get it in

there.

Yeah, exactly.

The question is, shall we taste it now or let it chill?

Um, well, since we're doing a podcast, let's just taste

it now and cut to the chase.

Okay.

This is like the best macaroni salad I've ever had.

The potato, I feel like rather than having a potato salad with macaroni, I

feel like I'm having macaroni salad with

potatoes.

It's amazing.

It's really, this is a carb fest.

This is really hearty and you could probably stretch this thing out to

serve 10, even with what we've made.

If you made other things on the grill, it's kind of sweet from sweet

from the pickle relish and the corn

and the potatoes.

I would

probably squiggle Sriracha over this top of this, but that's because

I like everything hot lately.

So I like everything spicy or I would mix a little Sriracha into it from

the get go into that dressing, but I'd probably squiggle it on top.

That's how I do it.

I like to switch on avocado toast, so you know what else

would be great is if I shredded up some cabbage or even some

kale and stirred that into it.

So it's not only potato salad, macaroni salad, egg salad.

It's also coleslaw dinner

dinner.

That's ridiculous.

That's like every protein and you.

Carb that you could possibly can slice up hot

dogs and throw that in there you go.

And, and now it's a potato salad.

All right, Sadie, thanks for the idea for a potato salad with pasta in it.

Something new to Bruce and not so new to me, but new in this incarnation to me.

Thanks for writing in on the Facebook group.

group.

Let me remind you that we have a newsletter.

It comes out in, I don't know, we have a couple of weeks, maybe every three weeks.

You can find it on our website, cookingbersonmark.

com or bruceandmark.

com.

It includes recipes such as this one and other things related to our life

in food or our life in New England.

As I've always told you, I can't capture your email.

I set it up to block your email from me and block your name from me.

And, uh, actually we pay more so that the provider can't capture your email

and your name and can't sell it.

So it's completely safe and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Up next, traditionally, our third segment, what's making us happy in food this week?

For me, it's a cherimoya.

And if you don't know what a cherimoya is, other names for it are the custard apple.

Yeah,

which doesn't really sell it.

And I

don't know what else they would call it, but it is, like,

shaped like a sort of an apple.

Sort of.

But it looks like it's scaly.

It looks like a little dragon skin.

It does.

And it's green.

It is.

And it gives, a little give when it's ripe, like an avocado.

And when you cut it open, the inside is white with big black seeds.

You get those black seeds out of the way because they are toxic and you

want to scoop out the white flesh.

It's very creamy.

It is almost like custard.

It has a flavor that's like a cross between a strawberry and a banana

and a mango and very tropical.

When we were in Madrid last year, we were in a restaurant where they had cherimoya.

vegan ice cream for dessert, and it was so delicious.

And now I know why, because this is so creamy.

Cherimoyas are so rich and creamy that I think I may have to make some ice cream

out of the extra one I have in the fridge.

So what's made me happy in food this week is I made some pies to

take to a friend's house over last weekend, and I made a rhubarb pie.

Rhubarb is.

In where we live in New England, it's now really in.

In fact, it's that time of year and I made a rhubarb pie and

not a strawberry rhubarb pie.

I was insistent that it just be a rhubarb pie.

I miss rhubarb pies from my childhood.

I love them.

so much.

Bruce made a ton, a metric ton of creme anglaise.

We brought that to a friend's house, and they, their grandkids, us, we

all just ate pie till we rolled on a

rhubarb

pie.

I know, rhubarb pie is a favorite.

Fantastic thing.

Well, that's the podcast episode for this week on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.

Thanks for joining us.

We certainly appreciate your spending your time on the podcast landscape with us.

And every week we share what's making us happy in food.

So keep on sharing what's making you happy in food this week at our Facebook

group, Cooking with Bruce and Mark, and we might just make your recipe right

here on Cooking with Bruce and Mark.