Egg Salad & Amma's Everything Dressing

I just adore my mother-in-law. She is so very thoughtful and kind. She and my father-in-law would give the shirts of their backs to help anyone who needed it. With all that sweetness and generosity, she still has some sass and can tell you what's what. She's the oldest of seven children and it shows. My father-in-law is 100% Icelandic so our girls call my in-laws "Amma" and "Afi" (Icelandic for grandmother and grandfather), special names for special people.

Amma authored one of my popular recipes "North Dakota Hotdish". As I shared in that post, she is one of those old-fashioned chefs that whips everything up from memory with a pinch of this and a dash of that. She makes everything with butter and cream (and love) and all things sinfully delicious (...but since she's not following a recipe we can all pretend it's only a "dab" of butter so it's not the calorie fest we fear.)

One of the things she's truly famous for is her salad dressing--coleslaw, potato salad, egg salad--really anything sweet and creamy that comes out of her kitchen contains a variation on this wonderful dressing. 

When we visited last week she just so happened to get called into work and she was disappointed that she wouldn't be there to make egg salad sandwiches for lunch. I jumped at the chance to get her to walk me through her recipe step by step and try it myself so here it is!

Amma's Egg Salad

Ingredients (amounts as close as I could figure from what she described):
1 cup Miracle Whip
1 cup heavy whipping cream
3 TB sugar
1-2 TB yellow mustard
a few drops of yellow food coloring
a dozen hard-boiled eggs

Directions:
Whip together the Miracle Whip (she uses the light version but regular will do too), heavy whipping cream and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the mustard. Start with one tablespoon of mustard and add more to your taste. 

To make the dressing classically yellow, add a few drops of yellow food coloring until you achieve the color you want. 

Chop up about a dozen hard-boiled eggs and gently fold in the dressing.

Amma uses this same recipe in her potato salad. For coleslaw, just skip the mustard and food coloring. Simple? Yes... but insanely delicious. 

 ingredients--Amma says to use ultra-pasteurized cream and the dressing will keep in the fridge for weeks (...not that anyone would let it go uneaten that long)

whipping up the cream, sugar and Miracle Whip

 a couple of tablespoons of mustard

 yum! light and fluffy and sweet

 add a few drops of food color to make it nice and yellow

cut the eggs using a handy egg slicer

 and the other way

 fold the dressing into the chopped eggs

serve on rye bread

Amma approved my trial run on her recipe, though I admit I felt like it was missing something. Maybe it's just that special touch that Amma's bring to the kitchen. Maybe when I'm an "Amma", I'll have the special love that makes it just right. 

...and hold on a second. Can we just take a minute to talk about one of my favorite features of my mother-in-law's kitchen?

I loooooove this thing! It's a storage unit for flour, sugar, coffee and cookies. It has two levels with the second level fitting together like a puzzle. It is deliciously vintage and straight out of the 70's. I've never seen anything like it but if I did I'd snatch it in a second. It just reminds me so much of good times in Amma's kitchen.

And can I just say that the ratios are totally off for their kitchen. My father-in-law drinks coffee like it's going out of style yet it's the smallest container. :)