Smitten Kitchen's Warm Potato Salad

The sun is setting at 5 PM now, so getting photos of my dinner that look nice is hard!

When I first saw Smitten Kitchen's recipe for potatoes with soft eggs and bacon vinaigrette, I knew I had to make it immediately, as it was a perfect combination of things that I love (potatoes! bacon! vinaigrette! soft eggs! some greens to make it healthy!) I made it for dinner the next night even though I didn't have all of the right ingredients on hand, and it is such a well-written formula that tweaking it to use slightly different ingredients still yields a delicious warm potato salad.

So! I have made this half a dozen times since Deb posted the recipe, and have figured out that I prefer this meal with poached rather than soft-boiled eggs (I find peeling soft eggs without crushing them to be rather difficult, alas), that it works better with greasier bacon so that there is sufficient bacon grease for the vinaigrette, that it is just fine without blue cheese, and that boxed salad greens work very well when your local grocery doesn't stock frisee.

Though I tend to make a couple ingredient changes from the original, I am just posting this as a recommended recipe, rather than posting a recipe here, because Deb's recipes are always so beautifully done and well-tested. You should make this, it is delicious and gluten-free, and by skipping the cheese it is dairy-free too!

When biologists play with their food...

...It looks a bit like this.

Kale, 40x

 I was eating some salad earlier as I thought about curriculum for teaching high school students microscopy. Then I wondered what my salad greens looked like up close. This resulted in me looking at salad under my microscope for some thirty minutes. It was fun!

Yes I do have a microscope at my apartment, we don't try to hide our geekiness at my abode.

Kale, 100x

This was the underside of a leaf of Italian kale. If you look closely, I think the little dark spots are stomata.

A piece of kale under the microscope. 

Kale isn't the best plant for observation without any sort of special treatment, though, because the leaves are very bumpy and I had a heck of a time trying to get the leaves in focus at 100x.

Radicchio, 40x 

 I had never actually looked at a non-green leaf under the microscope before. I was struck by how pretty the radicchio is, almost like stained glass.

Radicchio, 100x

Dandelion greens, 40x

I tried again with a much flatter leaf, some dandelion greens.

Dandelion greens, 40x

Dandelion greens, 100x

The 100x view reminds me a bit of a jigsaw puzzle.

I'll post an actual recipe sometime later this week; I just could not help posting pictures of salad up close.