Leftover Pasta Salad

We apologize for such a long delay in posting! We promise to get back on top of things and keep the recipes coming. Unfortunately, holding jobs and writing a master's thesis at the same time leaves some weeks to be quite chaotic and some things get left in the dust. Don't worry, we did eat the past few days...just nothing very exciting and when it was exciting we forgot about taking pictures :)

The only leftovers we had today

Today we had a short break and needed a quick lunch...the problem was we haven't made it to the store this week so our fridge is looking pretty empty. The solution was to throw together a quick pasta salad with the veggies that we had leftover from making salads and burritos earlier in the week.

Large chunks makes it a bit more interesting

The great thing about pasta salad is that it is extremely flexible. It is a lot like regular leaf salad. Whatever vegetables you have laying around can be added and the same goes for meat. Usually, when we make pasta salad we try to have a wide variety of textures (soft like corn to crunchy like carrot) and colors (bell peppers, carrots, tomatoes). Today, the choices were much more limited. We had plain pasta leftover from making too much for last night's dinner (woo for saving time having to wait for new pasta to cook!), one carrot, a few bell peppers from a friend's garden, and...

some paprika flavored salami (yes, I hear you gagging, no not you, you! But it taste good in the pasta salad!)

We don't really have a recipe today. We always just estimate and every time it comes out a little bit different. It always depends on how much stuff you have to go in it. Just cut up everything (we go for large pieces to make it more interesting) and mix it together.This time we also cooked the salami for a few minutes on the stove to get it nice and crispy and then mixed it in with everything else.



Make a olive oil/ apple vinegar dressing with lots of seasoning (basil, oreagno, pepper, salt, etc. etc). You want to be heavy on the olive oil and light on the vinegar but the best thing to do is experiment and taste it before pouring it over the pasta.

Stir and there you have it. Extremely easy and extremely useful for using up leftover vegetables.