Potato Salad

Yesterday we hosted a great Memorial Day barbeque, as I trust many of you did. The Memorial Day BBQ marks the traditional beginning of Summer, and more BBQ’s inevitably follow. As I was making potato salad for the party, I remembered another family BBQ I once attended at my in-laws’s house a few years ago.

The barbeque started out perfectly. The setting was idyllic. The barbeque had all of the important elements. There were picnic tables with the red-checkered table cloths out on the back lawn, gallons of lemonade, hot dogs AND hamburgers! Grandma was there talking about the Great Depression and Grandpa was there telling stories about the war. There were huge trees to provide shade, and a swing set to keep the kids busy (and in one case, caused a slight head injury). There was corn on the cob, and watermelon, and potato salad…oh, the potato salad.

On this perfect day, my wife was assigned to make the potato salad. She pulled out one of her trusty recipes known as Patio Potato Salad. It is a somewhat unique recipe that calls for 1/3 cup of sugar…yep, someone actually designed a potato salad recipe with sugar in it. Crazy, huh?
Well, that’s where the fun begins. My brother-in-law fancies himself as quite a connoisseur (hey, I spelled that right on the very first try!) of fine food. In his mind, he is the crème de la crème of fancy chefs. He is the self-proclaimed expert on haute cuisine…even though: a) he has no real culinary training beyond the magic bullet infomercials he’s seen on TV, and b) most of his invented recipes consist of just throwing a little of just about everything in the spice drawer in, and c) the closest thing to a chef he has ever been was when he once landed a job dipping fattening foods into hot oil and serving them to greasy men at a strip club (I swear, I am not making this up). He once made up a recipe for Thanksgiving Stuffing out of gingerbread…and um, just an FYI, that is not recommended unless you REALLY hate your Thanksgiving guests. The dog wouldn’t even eat that stuff, but we dutifully indulged him and praised his fine culinary creativity…while shuttling small children to the bathroom and back to dispose of the stuffing in concealed napkins.

Well, Chef Gousteau took great offense to my wife’s use of sugar in the potato salad. (Like he should talk!) Most full-grown adults would have just discretely scooped the offending food off the plate for the dog to eat. Well, my brother-in-law does not generally act like most full-grown adults. He erupted into a rage (still not making this up) and threw the potato salad out of the glass bowl all over the back lawn, all the while yelling at his sister that “She thinks she knows everything, but she doesn’t know [poop].” (Maybe he thought it just needed a touch of grass clippings to compensate for the sugar and make it just right? Maybe?) I am not the swiftest boat on the water, but I can recognize my cue to leave…and that was it. I was busy herding the children away from the uproar and into our car, and with that, the perfect BBQ came crashing to an abrupt end.

So, all the way home, I had to try and figure out how to explain to a three-year-old that sometimes big people act like preschoolers. Unfortunately, (or fortunately) small children do not understand stuff like “Prozak” and “bipolar disorder.” Has this ever happened to you? How do you explain a big person temper tantrum to a small child?