Healthy Potato Salads - Daring Cook Challenge June 2011

To be honest, I was disappointed when this months challenge was revealed. Potato salad?!? What is so daring about that? Also it was a competition to come up with a recipe, which I am not very good at. Oh well, I thought, I'll make a couple of potato salads, we'll eat them, I'll post and then we can move onto next month. So I turned to some of my favorite cookbooks for healthy potato salad inspiration.

The first was Heidi Swanson's Super Natural Everyday. I am one of the legion of fans of Heidi's natural food-focused blog 101 Cookbooks and in her new book I found a recipe for Broccoli Gribiche. Her description in the head-note - Think French-dressed egg salad, meets potato salad, punctuated by plenty of broccoli - had my mouth watering and the end result was terrific. The dressing is a gribiche sauce - hard-boiled egg, vinegar, mustard, capers, shallots and herbs. So its healthier than mayo, but with that nice vinegar tang you expect from potato salad.

So far so good. The second recipe I tried was from Karen Martini's Where the Heart Is. Karen Martini is not known for healthy cooking. Even I have been known to gasp at the amount of fat and sugar in some of her recipes, but I cook them a lot and they are always super tasty. We had some dill left over so I was drawn to the Warm potato, Dill, Caper and Mustard salad. The vinegar, mustard and lemon juice dressing is added to well-boiled potato when they are still hot. The end result was a lovely creamy texture, once again without mayo. Win.

So after two successes, I deciding to get daring and come up with my own healthy potato salad. I loved the texture of the baked potato in the first salad I made. And I have been mad for this tahini salad dressing the past few weeks, so I knew I would use that. Then I just brainstormed for other ingredients that are healthy but totally delicious, and came up with avocado, edaname and beetroot.

I gotta say, for someone who doesn't make up her own recipes very often, I killed it. This was a seriously yummy salad and it is about as healthy as they come. I actually proud to submit my baby to the competition and I hope someone out there will try it and like it as much as we did.

Ingredients

4 medium potatoes, skin on, cut into 2cm cubes

1 Tsp olive oil

2 beetroots

1 avocado

1 cup frozen edaname (soy beans)

2 Tbs tahini

1 Tbs lemon juice

2 tsp dijon mustard

1 tsp soy sauce

Directions

Heat oven to 180

Wrap beetroot together in foil and seal well. Place on a tray and roast in oven for 1 hour.

Combine potatoes with olive oil in a baking tray and season well with salt and pepper.

Roast potatoes in oven with beetroot for around 45 minutes, stirring several times.

Cook edaname in boiling water or microwave for around 2 minutes and drain well.

To make dressing, combine tahini, lemon juice, dijon and soy sauce in a jar with a lid and shake until creamy. You may want to thin it a little with hot water and shake again.

Peel and dice the cooled beetroot and the avocado. Combine the cooled potatoes, diced beetroot, edaname and avocado in a bowl and drizzle over a generous amount of tahini dressing.

You can stir the salad at the point if you like, but the bossy beetroot will turn everything pink.