Mom's Pasta Salad.

This is one of the famous recipes in my family. My mom invented this recipe decades ago and we have it at every family gathering. It's a great little pasta salad that ends up being fairly healthy if you use the right kind of pasta. We have famously used fun-shaped pasta for Easter or Christmas, along with differently colored peppers. This is seriously a hit.





Ingredients:
1 bag/box of pasta
1 cucumber
1 can olives
1/2 a bell pepper
1/4 a red onion
2-3 Roma tomatoes
1/2 bottle of Salad Supreme
1/2 bottle of Wishbone Italian dressing

First, boil your water for the pasta. While this is boiling, you should start chopping your veggies. I'm going to list the order that I cut the veggies. The order in which I do it prevents cutting board cross-contamination (ie it makes it neat and pretty).

First, peel the cucumber skin off with a potato peeler. Next, slice it (like a hamburger pickle slice) about 1/4 an inch thick. Once the whole cucumber is sliced, slice the pieces again in half. Set aside.

Next, dice the bell pepper. Basically, you want small pieces. See picture if you don't understand it. Don't use the seeds, if for some reason you wanted to. Sometimes you get lucky and a baby bell pepper is growing inside the bell pepper. That's always really exciting to me.

Now open the can of olives. Drain the juice. Slice the olives so that each olive yields about 3 slices. The best brand is called Lindsay. I don't know if they have it everywhere, but they definitely do in California and Georgie. It rocks.

Next, dice the tomato. Again, see the picture for size reference. I usually don't use the inside of the tomato with all the seedy badness. It just makes the salad gooey. I dice around that and throw it away.

Finally, cut up the onion. You want these to be really really fine. If you have a distaste for onions, you really don't have to use 1/2 an onion. My mom always only used a tiny handful of onions, but I kinda like more.

By now your water should be boiling. If it boiled earlier, I'm sure you had the intuition to go put your pasta in. After years of trying, I have found THE perfect pasta salad pasta: Trader Joe's Organic Radiatorre. These little... strange corkscrewy things are SOOO perfect and since they're vegetable pasta, it looks and tastes better. So boil your pasta per the directions.

When it's ready, strain the pasta and RINSE WITH COLD WATER. Make sure the pasta isn't hot. Again, that will yield gooeyness. This salad is meant to be crisp. Drain the water.

This is another salad that is best prepared layered. I learned layering from my mom with this recipe. In a big bowl, place a layer of pasta at the bottom. Cover it with salad supreme (really cover it now). Then, add a layer of your veggies. Cover that with a bit of dressing. Then create another layer and do this until all your ingredients are used up.

At the very end, cover with as much salad supreme as you have left, leaving about half the bottle full. Do the same with the Italian dressing, again, leaving half the bottle full. Stir the salad up and it's ready!

I LOVE this salad when it's fresh, but in my family we always had gatherings that we prepared it for, so we'd make it the night before. When you take it out after leaving it overnight, make sure to add more dressing, 'cause it gets all sucked up by the pasta.

I hope you like this salad a lot because it's sort of a secret recipe. :D