To Bring a Side to a Cookout: Bacon Potato Anxiety Salad Edition

This is essentially German potato salad, which if you're unfamiliar is a warm potato salad with a vinegar based dressing and some bacon. I'm mostly comfortable with making the recipe: boil the potatoes, fry some bacon, sautee some chopped onion in the bacon fat, make a dressing of vinegar, mustard & sugar. Let the taters soak it all in while they're warm. THAT is KEY. (I've still no idea how much vinegar mustard OR sugar, but I do know that you should drain more bacon fat than I did; because although bacon fat is absolutely the best thing in the world, it's hard to cut, even with apple cider vinegar.)

So, when I offered to bring a side dish to a cookout, you'd maybe think I'd just make the thing I know how to make. But, I don't follow that rule (sometimes to bad results) of "don't make something for a party unless you've tried it before!" because, while I appreciate the notion that Maggie from accounting always reliably brings her buffalo chicken dip to the party that everyone loves! I more appreciate a risk that hopefully pays off with everyone being like: OMG WHITNEY I LOVE YOU (and your cooking, etc etc). Often, the exercise ends in nothing like that happening and I'm riddled with anxiety as people try the foods I've been pouring over, because well, I've never gotten feedback on the dish except for this moment now when if they DO praise me I'll be convinced they're lying to not hurt my feelings. And, after the party they're like: "dude Whitney's salad was GROSS."

LIKE I DO: instead of just making the thing I've made before, I read about 6000 articles about what people usually bring to cook outs. [Googled: "BEST potato salad" "Orgasmic coleslaw" "BITCHES fucking LOVE this SIDE dish."] I learned, and this is not scientifically proven, but a lot of the peoples bring potato salads to parties. A lot of those fools put mayonnaise in their dressing and some do not think to add any green. To me, those are necessary components, or non-components to a good 'tater salad. In the end I ignored them, sort of.

Because nothing was SPEAKING to me, I was like FINE!!!!!!! I'll just make the potato salad that my mother makes. (Which is the weirdest sentence in the English language since my mother cooks once every decade.) BUT, I couldn't leave well enough alone,  and needed a signature addition, so I added pickled green beans cause of inspiration #1 and I roasted 1/2 the potatoes cause of inspiration #2. And, as always, as all the good bitches do, I added green onions to the top of the potato salad. As ALWAYS. People said it was good; they were probably just being nice.