- May 30, 2022
- 3 min read

Pasta Salad, All Week

Updated: Jun 30, 2023

Good morning!

In my small kitchen, turning on the oven for more than 30 minutes really does impact the temperature of the rest of the house, for the next few hours. It's hot outside, and for this reason, I've been gravitating towards batch cooking and cold salad prepping. Aside from a few meals where I'm cooking something specific and very substantial, most of my meals are versions of themselves from the day before, cold and crunchy, and mostly already made.

For starters, I've been making some sort of pasta salad at the beginning of each week. One whole box or sleeve of pasta, copious amounts of a vinegarette mixed with shaved vegetables like radish and carrot, chopped nuts and olives, cucumbers and tomatoes, and a block of pesto rescued from the freezer. Sometimes there are boiled eggs, leftover chicken or fish, and green onions if I'm lucky. (Green onions make everything better, no?) On day 3 when the pasta salad is almost gone, sometimes I'll mix in a can of high-quality tuna in oil into the bowl, adding maybe only a squeeze of lemon or a bit more salt. Sometimes the vinaigrette is augmented by a big dollop of mayo or alternatively, some tahini. And cheese! Cheese gets eaten first at my house, so if I want a pasta salad to have cheese, like feta or a sharp cheddar, I better have just gone to the grocery store. Sometimes I make a big batch of what we've started calling "crunchies" - fried and seasoned panko with lemon zest, herbs, and sunflower seeds, which gets piled on top of pasta salad (or regular salad) for some interesting...well, crunch. Fried onions or shallots would fill the same void, as would croutons or toasted bits of pita.

For the best pasta-salad salad experience, I strongly recommend either roasting or boiling all of your Vrdnt roots - carrots, beets, potatoes, and then storing in individual Tupperware, tossed with a bit of salt, olive oil, and a splash of vinegar. These are ready to go to top, or maybe even bottom, a big bowl of cold noodles - mini salads themselves, ready to join the pasta party, or not. Sometimes the pasta salad is served on a plate over a bed of lettuce or arugula, and sometimes I just eat it directly from its storage container, using the fork that often lives on top of the Tupperware in the fridge. Pasta salad is like basecamp for everything pickled in the fridge. When the pasta needs stretching, you can simply add to it: a generous cup of slivered celery, or a can of beans, or both. This pasta salad is also a great lunch for my husband to bring to work, tucked away in his tiny cooler. The crunchies get thrown in a ziplock bag.

Anyway, if you're hot, and sad, and sick, and at a loss, maybe just make a big batch of cold noodle salad, and call it good. (It is good.)