It’s St. Patrick’s Day, and though I’m not going to be posting about something traditionally Irish, I did manage to come up with something that’s technically green, or served on something green, at least. Hey, I told you that I have a backlog of recipes, and I’m still back around Christmas. At this rate, you might see a St. Patrick’s Day recipe in July sometime. I should just have a two week marathon posting session so I can get caught up on the recipes.

Anyway, enough about me being an embarrassment to my Irish ancestors. A while back, I went out to dinner with a friend, and the restaurant that we went to (Mexican, by the way) had the tastiest peppercorn dressing. This recipe is my attempt at recreating their creamy peppercorn dressing, and I think that I got pretty close.

Warning: if you don’t want to deal with major garlic breath, you will want to cut down on the garlic — maybe add half or a quarter clove, instead of a whole clove. It’ll still be quite delicious.

B is not a fan of the typical potato salad. In fact, he won’t eat any cold pasta, egg, or potato based salad. I used to think that it was because most of them have mayonnaise-based dressings — he hates mayonnaise — but have since come to learn that he’s not a fan of the cold temperatures at which these salads are served…unless you’re at an outdoor, summer get together and the salad has been sitting out in the hot sun all day, in which case you’ve got other things to worry about.

So, since I was having a craving for some sort of potato salad, and I knew that B wouldn’t touch one that had any mayonnaise in it, I decided to try a German potato salad. B loves bacon and potatoes, he doesn’t seem to mind vinegar, and the salad is served warm. Perfect, right? Well, no. He would have nothing to do with this salad, much to my chagrin yet, at the same time, much to my pleasure since I really liked this potato salad. The combination of crispy bacon, tangy vinegar, tasty onions, and a touch of sugar was quite yummy over the warm potatoes. And the best part was that I had plenty of leftovers all to myself.

I stayed mostly in line the original recipe, though I did use apple cider vinegar instead of white vinegar and swapped out the sugar with xylitol, a new sugar alternative that I’ve been playing with. I’ll tell you more about xylitol in a forthcoming post.

Who knew that it would be so difficult to find ponzu sauce? I checked at the supermarket and went to the Asian market twice, to no avail. I think that the guy stocking the shelves in the soy sauce/vinegar aisle at the Asian market, who happened to be there on both days that I went, thought I was a little nutty. Oh well. In the end, I improvised and substituted a soy sauce and lemon juice combo. My sauce didn’t have the fish and seaweed elements, but all worked out well, anyway.

The chicken salad was bright and fresh tasting, with the cool, crisp cucumber and crunchy baby bok choy and peas. And the sauce seasoned everything, including the chicken, quite well. I ended up adding extra crushed red pepper, which I used in place of the jalapeno chile, to spice things up a bit more. Oh, and I baked the chicken instead of poaching it for some added flavor and used parsley instead of cilantro because I’m not a real fan of cilantro.