Elbows on the Table Pasta Salad

Staples. We all fall back on them. I always find myself buying the usual three: carrots, celery and onion. Once in a while I'll mix it up with a few other vegetables. This time I enhanced my usual veggies with radishes and green onions as well.

Question: why stick with these mundane vegetables? Main reason, they're cheap. They are also very versatile.

Dilemma: How to not get bored fixing meals with the same main ingredients.

As these vegetables are my larder regulars, many of my recipes start with these ingredients. We'll be talking more about that in future posts. Meanwhile, let's talk last night's dinner.

I wanted something easy and not too heavy, but still translate into comfort food. I came up with Elbows on the Table Pasta Salad. I also want to shout out to the Pioneer Woman for the inspiration for the dressing for this salad. I didn't have all her ingredients, so made due with what I had. It was delicious, and even better, the Nutster liked it! My version is below, but click the link to check out hers too so you can get the original of this homemade ranch dressing.


Elbows on the Table Pasta Salad

1 c elbow macaroni, boiled, drained and cooled (you're yield will be a healthy 2 cups of cooked pasta)
8 oz cooked chicken, roughly chopped. I used chicken tenderloins from the freezer, but this could be a great use for leftover grilled chicken as well.
Now the veggies. This can totally be to taste, so I'm sharing what I actually used for Nut and myself:
1 large carrot chopped
2 stalks celery chopped
3 green onions chopped
3 radishes chopped
1 4oz can sliced black olives, drained
Ranch Dressing:
1/2 c mayo
1/2 lemon juiced
1 large clove garlic, mashed to a pulp with a little salt
2 green onions finely chopped
1/4t dried dill (more doesn't hurt if you're a big dill fan)
salt and pepper to tast
(this is optional, but I loosed the dressing just a bit with some pasta water while the elbows were cooking. It give a bit of salty starchiness along with thinning out what would be a very thick dressing.)

I made the dressing about an hour before mixing with the rest of the ingredients, just to get the flavors friendly with each other.

So mix! just dump everything into a bowl. I took a tip from Foodtv and made the dressing in the bottom of my mixing bowl. Then all the rest of the ingredients were added and mixed thoroughly. Summon your favorite taste tester and see if you need more salt and/or pepper.

It was yummy! The nice thing also, you can change out the type of pasta, the number or kind of vegetables, or the type of meat. My meat, potatoes and pizza guy thought cubed pepperoni would be good. I think he might be right! When I try it, you'll read it here on Food Budgetry.

So again, with this recipe, I was able to do what is usually my goal in meal planning. Used up a partial bag of pasta, cooked from the fridge and freezer, and did not succumb to the horrible food weakness. Best of all, Nut liked it! Woohoo!