The Fourth of July demands two things: Potato salad and red, white and blue everything. Well. The Fourth of July also demands fireworks. And ice cream sandwiches. And grilled meats. And something for the vegetarians. The Fourth of July is actually a really demanding brat, isn’t it? You never hear Flag Day getting all mouthy like that.

Potato Things: Just for the sake of hushing up the Fourth of July’s fresh mouth, the potato things used in this salad are red, white and blue baby confetti taters. 28 ounces of ’em. (That’s 1¾ pounds.) Cut up into quarters (“quartered”), boiled for ten or so minutes in salted water until they’re fork tender, then drained.

Salad Things: Salad is delicious and so we’ll be emphasizing the salad part of the experience by stirring green onion (2), radish (3), celery (3 stalks) and yellow pepper (1 small) in with our tubers. But you could change around the salad things if you wanted. Those four offer a nice range of colors and flavors, which is why they’re in my salad, but you may decide you prefer your food more on the monochromatic side and stick with entirely green things.

Regardless, it’s important to think for a moment about the inclusion of crunchy, flavorful items in potato salad: a thing to remember is that you need to take differing palates into consideration. You should absolutely include these things! But you should include them in a specific and versatile way.

Which, roughly translated, means this: you have to appease the celery deniers. [Ed. note – Celery is an impediment to human happiness.] And the radish deniers. And the onion deniers. Basically, humor the folks who hate taste-ed foodstuffs. The way to do that is to provide a variety of those things cut into manageable pieces.

Thus, the people who love the bite of a good vegetable with their potatoes are satisfied.

Those who like more potato and less crunch can serve themselves accordingly.

And those of you who hate vegetables/taste/joy can pick all the tiny pieces of offending matter off to the corner of their plate without making too much of a scene about it. (But stop doing that. A little radish won’t kill you.) The trick, in terms of respecting the inexplicable demands of these freak outliers, is to not cut the veggies so small that they sneak up on unsuspecting vegetable avoiders. Think less confetti and more ticker tape.

Dressing: The biggest thing to know about the dressing is that you should mix it up while the potatoes are draining, then transfer them back to the pot in which you boiled them, and then pour the dressing over them. While they’re hot, that’s the key. Then later, when things have cooled, you can transfer the dressed taters to your large bowl in which the salad portion of things has been waiting patiently.

The other thing you should know is that there’s no mayo in this dressing. Mayo dressings are wonderful! But it’s just not what we’re using in this particular potato salad.

Whisk together:

4T cider vinegar
2T dijon mustard
1T olive oil
½t salt
¼t black pepper
½t mustard seed
1 packet Splenda

Oh gosh, you know? There are a few more things I need to tell you about this dressing: (1) I had mustard seeds so I threw them in because of their good looks but if you don’t have them you can skip that part. (2) If you hate Splenda you can use sugar. The Splenda was just right out there on my counter when I was making this, so. One packet of Splenda equals 2 teaspoons of the real stuff. (3) You can substitute a vinegar or an oil or a mustard you prefer to the ones I used. A lighter vinegar is the ticket here though. Avoid the stickier, more syrupy type vinegars. I’m looking at you, Balsamic.

Once your salad is together, cover it up with some plastic or tin wrap and refrigerate it for, oh…an hour at least? Then taste it. Does it need something else? Put that something else in. Then serve it.