Supper For The Less Fortunate

Our neighbor attends a church that is part of a group of church’s providing food, shelter, and other assistance for short term homeless families and we offered to help with some meals.  We scheduled our first one to coincide with April's BBQ day so we could deliver the meat fresh out of the smoker.

My initial menu thought was to provide fairly classical BBQ fare of meat, beans, and mac & cheese.  Since it was big meat and chicken day on the smoker, I cooked a couple of pork butts and some thighs.  For the sides, I was thinking Ranch Beans until I found a recipe for baked beans that sounded good and could be cooked in a crock pot, requiring very little attention on a busy day.  The other side dish changed from mac & cheese to Pasta Salad Primavera to provide some veggies.  I looked at several recipes and ended up with the following:

Pasta Primavera Ala Larry

Ingredients:

2 lb. Rotini pasta (or your favorite)

4 cups carrot, diced

6 cups yellow squash, diced

6 cups broccoli, small florets

4 cups red bell pepper, diced

4 cups frozen peas, thawed

1 can black olives, halved

1 jar marinated artichoke hearts, halved

1 tsp. each dried oregano, basil, thyme leaves

½ - 1# hard salami, julienned

2 pkg. Kraft cheese crumbles, 4 cheese blend

½ cup parmesan, grated

1½ bottles Newman’s Caesar Dressing

¼ cup EVOO

S&P to taste

Directions:

1. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil and prepare a large ice water bath. Add carrots to the boiling water, and simmer 2 minutes.  Add squash, and cook 2 minutes more.  Add broccoli and bell pepper, and cook 2 minutes more.  Add peas, and cook 2 minutes more.

2. Pour everything into a large colander, drain, and dump into the ice water bath.  When cool dump back in the colander to drain, then into a large bowl or pan.

3. Refill the pot with salted water and bring to a rolling boil, add pasta, and to al dente. Dump in the colander and rinse under cold water to cool.

4. When cool, add the pasta to the veggies along with the next eight ingredients and carefully mix well.  

5. Taste, adjust S&P, and remix.  

I failed to get a shot of the delivered salad, so this is our bowl the next day but the broccoli had lost it’s bright green color.

For a pasta salad in which a lot of veggies are desired, this one is a very good and I will make it again.  It goes without saying (so why did I you ask?) that all ingredients can be varied for individual taste – we added the larger amount of salami to ours.  This recipe makes a bunch as written and one fourth of it would be about right for a regular batch.

Photos best if enlarged by clicking on them.

Have a great day and thanks for stopping by Almost Heaven South.

Larry

4/17/13 meal date