On Pasta

And cooking for the summer weather.

Welcome to our third paid-subscriber only situation! Please know that there is a hard stop ahead, which I know can be annoying, but it’s either this or endless pop-up ads on a website, so here we are. If you love what I’m doing and want access to easy, riff-able recipes like this, please do smash that sweet little manage subscription button. I appreciate you!

Everyone and their mother has a recipe for pasta salad. BUT, does everyone and their mother have a recipe for pasta salad that goes from hot to cold, making it absolutely perfect for summer picnics, late dinners on the beach, and a room temperature lunch consumed while sitting as close as possible to the air conditioner? If you think the answer might be yes, don’t answer the question!

I have never been what you would call a “meal planner,” per se, but I do love knowing what our next meal is going to be. This summer, amidst one of the busiest seasons my little baby company has seen, being able to strategize for dinner the moment I wake up has proven to be a VICS (very important coping strategy).

Enter this pasta salad/one-pot pasta love child. Lest we forget, the one-pot pasta trend of late 2019 to early 2020 raised awareness that you could, as the name suggests, combine all of the ingredients for your pasta dish into one pot, cook everything together, and call it dinner. Huzzah!

Warm, cold, room temperature! This pasta salad meets you where you are.

I’m a big fan of doing fewer dishes, but I’m an even bigger fan of eating cold dinners on brutally hot days, so I developed this recipe to cook like a one-pot pasta and eat like the cold pasta salad that someone brings to every summer dinner party. The key here is to add any vegetables you have hanging around the garden (is anyone else drowning in zucchini?) and not to compromise on the punchy, tangy flavors that make this special — I’m talking about preserved lemons and olives, along with gratuitous amounts of parsley.

As with any recipe I write, I hope that you can make it your own, riff, and go wild. Want to add roasted chicken? Go for it. I’ve added sardines and anchovies after the dish is cooked, and it’s divine. Hate olives? Leave them out, then unsubscribe (just kidding!). This is a template, my friends, and the goal is to get you to cook something, not to give you a rigid set of rules to follow at risk of failure. That’s what math is for.