We wanted something light and refreshing for supper dinner supper tonight, along with the watermelon in the frig and Gordon’s “steak fries” that he bakes every now and then (they’re like old friends that come around often). I LOVE macaroni salad, but it is often too goopy for me, so this recipe is my attempt to solve that. As I review this entry I suddenly insert “dinner” where the word “supper” was in the first sentence since a friend heard me say “supper” recently and wondered what the word meant. She chalked it up to my Southern upbringing. What? Supper is not known and loved? Growing up, we ate the largest meal at noon (thus “dinner”) and a lighter meal “supper” in the evening. If “dinner” and “supper” mean the same thing, then I wonder how I will talk about the light meal we had tonight? “Dinner” is too formal a word for macaroni salad, watermelon and steak fries. So I Google the word. That’s what we do these days when we have questions. More on that in another “recipe.” Anyway, I found a site – a Harvard research study  – that addresses the issue. It seems there are many ways of thinking, so I go back to the first sentence and reinstate “supper.” All seems right with the world. I guess I know where that puts me in the Harvard study…It reminds me of the time a friend (different friend) asked why I pronounced “ask” and “asked” the same way. I was gobsmacked. I never realized I did that and it stunned me that I could have mispronounced a word as pervasive as “asked” for so long. Being a public speaker, it completely baffled me that nobody had said anything until then. So, I was “gobsmacked,” “stunned” and “baffled” – the first of which is my favorite word – for now. I learned it from my Scottish father-in-law and it works so well. With the word “smacked” embedded in the word, it says exactly how it feels to be that surprised – gob”smacked” in the face by awareness. Even to this day I have to slowly pronounce “ask-ed” to say it correctly, sounding like a child learning phonetics. Anyway, we had “Tangy Macaroni Salad” and it was great, a perfect “supper” dish. And don’t forget the spring salad part of it since it adds to the taste of the salad. In this case, the greens are not just there for looks.

Ingredients

Directions