Potato salad topped with squid "shiokara" イカの塩辛のせポテトサラダ

In one of the Izakaya blogs I follow, I saw a recipe to put squid "shiokara"イカの塩辛 ( or as my wife will say "squid and guts") on either mashed potatoes or potato salad. This recipe came to mind one evening after I came back from the Japanese grocery store with a package of shiokara (comes frozen in a plastic pouch) and one package containing 2 small boiled octopus legs. Since I already had potato salad in the fridge I decided to make a small dish of the potato salad topped it the shiokara as per the recipe. As another small dish, I sliced the octopus and served it on top of some daikon namasu 大根なます I had made for the new year. These two small items (shown in the picture below) were starter dishes for the evening meal.

The picture below shows the shiokara topped potato salad.  The idea here is that the salty and umami flavors of the shiokara will enhance the flavor of the potato.

The below is the octopus dish.  I just sliced the octopus leg thinly on the diagonal in a wavy pattern. I put the daikon namsu on the bottom of the small bowl and put the cut octopus on top.  I have been making a few Japanese sauces and storing them in the fridge in small squeeze bottles.  I squeezed some sumiso sauce that I made few days ago on top of the octopus. (Having these pre-made sauces ready in squeeze bottles is very convenient).

The potato salad shiokara combination is not bad but we both felt enjoying the potato salad and shiokara separately may be better. As my wife put it, "the purity of the shiokara flavor and the purity of the potato flavor are best experienced individually and in their own right." Thus sayeth a shiokara purist.