Magical Pasta Salad

Mary and I have picked up this sort of bad habit: Late at night when we’re bored, when reading another chapter of Return of the King seems impossible and watching another episode of 30 Rock feels pathetic, we make food.

Sometimes this food is weird, (like the salty chocolate chip cookies we made –– whatever, we still ate nine of them in two hours), sometimes it is bad (greasy homemade graham cracker crust with melted chocolate and peanut butter spread on it, stuck in the freezer; it may be every 5-year-old’s dream come true, but it was definitely not delicious, and vaguely depressing), and every once in a while, it is awesome.

Like last night.

We’d had this bowl of rigatoni taking up space in the fridge for a while and kept forgetting to eat it. So at about 10:30 p.m. we decided to make pasta salad.

I’ve never done that before, and I don’t think Mary has either. But about $0.30 of pasta was on the line, so we didn’t worry too much about planning ahead of time or anything. This is what we did:

1. Added about a tablespoon of olive oil and maybe 2 teaspoons of apple cider vinegar to a bowl of rigatoni.

2. Dumped in everything else in our fridge and pantry.

Well, not exactly. But here’s a list of things we added without any special rhyme or reason:

-capers

-chopped sun-dried tomatoes

-sprouts

-green onions

-spinach

-basil

-sage

-garlic

-salt

-plenty of black pepper

-a little leftover Caesar salad dressing

-celery

And you know what? After about 30 seconds of work, it tasted awesome. I kid you not, this stuff is absolutely delicious.