What's Your All-American Holiday Food?

Most holidays (the meaningful ones, anyway) end up centered around a meal. A holiday meal isn't just food, of course. It's a chance to come together and share, to join in a fellowship that echoes the holy rituals of many religions. Thanksgiving has its turkey, Easter its ham -- and those meals are often eaten with an eye to the meaning of the day.

The Fourth of July meal tends to be a little more raucous. And, be it a picnic or a barbecue, a lot more outdoorsy. But that doesn't mean we don't all have our own traditions around what you eat and how you eat it. Given the nature of the holiday, it seems like what you eat should be somehow American, since that is after all what's being celebrated here. (You could also go for a freedom theme and grill only free-range meats, I guess.) But what's even American? I once went to a party thrown by an Australian woman who asked guests to bring food they considered typically American, and the menu ranged from pancakes to takeout Chinese food.

I'll be honest: my family doesn't do the Fourth. My parents are not holiday people, and when I was a kid, I usually hoped someone would invite me to their family's barbecue. For the last several years, I've usually been at a Sacred Harp singing in Alabama on the Fourth, eating southern picnic food off a thirty-foot concrete table. Fried green tomatoes, pecan pie, all sorts of food like I never grew up on. This year I'm not going to Alabama, but I will be singing on Saturday, so I'm cooking picnic food a day late. I'll be making a pasta salad with a dressing that looks bland and white, but has a zing of garlic and wine. I was going to make my mother's slaw, but the grocery store was sold out of bags of shredded cabbage, so I'm making a taco salad recipe I learned in Alabama. For dessert, those awesome chewy peanut buttery chocolate topped rice krispy treats. And I'll be bringing a gluten-free black forest cake I got at Trader Joe's.

So what about you? What are your traditions -- either the ones you grew up with or the ones you happened into as an adult? Will you be cooking, and will it be outdoors over an open flame? Burgers or barbecue? What's your potato salad recipe? (Seriously, I need a potato salad recipe.) What's your favorite patriotic-themed recipe, and does it match the flag of red, white, and blue jello shooters one Daily Kos contributing editor once created? For once on this site, recipes are welcomed by the diarist.