Picnic! At The Park...

Dinner 6/08

Chipotle Soy Hot Dogs

Potato Salad


We're visiting Columbus this weekend for two graduations, and tonight was the party/cookout held at an area park shelter -- which as vegans know, can be fraught with disaster ;)

We mitigated that by bringing our own stash of food, but still needed to resort to some Alton Brown-like contraption building to get the chipotle dogs cooked. The rest of the party food was pre-cooked, and reheated using sterno as the heating source with aluminum steam trays to keep it hot.

Luckily, there were extra aluminum trays and sterno, but no additional racks to hold the trays. So we made our own modified steam tray by using the unused shelter grills as a base. We started by flipping one of the trays over, and placing the sterno on top of that and slid that just underneath the grill. Next, on top of the grill, we placed one tray filled with the ice cubes from our cooler (to keep the sterno from burning through), set a second tray inside of that with additional ice cubes and after both melted down, poached the chipotle dogs (which turned out great).

The potato salad recipe is from James Peterson's "Vegetables" book -- it's simply cooked and peeled potatoes mixed with sherry vinegar, salt and pepper, then celery, parsley, dill, basil, tarragon and vegenaise. It kept in the little cooler just fine on the two-hour trip...

Tomorrow... Dragonfly.

Tags: potato salad, james peterson, alton brown, columbus ohio, picnic, vegan, food, dinner, tofu666