Pasta Salad -- Update

In the summertime, I love doing outside things. When I lived in Boone, we would go hiking in the mountains, I worked outside in the summers and there were tons of opportunities for hanging out outside. On all those hiking trips, we would bring a picnic with us. Whenever my sister came to visit, the picnic would include pasta salad.

I made this pasta salad twice this week. Once to feed some friends dinner and once to take on a picnic.

Because I made it over and over, I looked back at the blog and realized I have the recipe -- an older version -- but no picture. How unPinnable!

So I determined it was absolutely necessary to give you an update for the pasta salad.




Heather's Pasta Salad

Ingredients:
8 oz package rice pasta (I still like DeBole's rice pasta the best)
1 box cherry or grape tomatoes, halved
1 can black olives, sliced
1 green bell pepper, diced
1/2 cup olive oil
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/4 cup champagne vinegar

Optional: 1 box crumbled feta cheese

Directions:
Cook the pasta, then shock it in cold water. Add the pasta to the chopped veggies. Pour the olive oil and vinegars over everything and mix well. Serve immediately or let it sit and marinate. The flavors develop nicely overnight, but the pasta is better at room temperature. So let it warm up as you go for a long hike.

Pasta Salad

I messed around with a recipe on Wednesday, and came up with something that I found quite tasty.

I'll include a short review here as well. I bought a box of DeBole's gluten-free pasta with golden flaxseeds.

I found it to be very tasty. Rice pasta is always a little different, but this didn't become gummy like some of them can, and walked the fine line between being too al dente and just falling apart quite well.

Pasta Salad
Adapted from Meghan Telpner's Quinoa Tabouli
1 box of gluten-free pasta
4 roma tomatoes
3 carrots, grated
4-5 celery stalks, chopped
1 can olives, halved
1 can garbanzo beans, rinsed
1/4 cup lemon juice
1/4 cup olive oil
3 tbs tamari (gluten-free soy sauce)
2 tsp oregano
2 tsp basil
2 tsp parsley

Cook the pasta according to the package directions.
Dice the tomatoes and toss them in a large bowl, add the grated carrots, the chopped celery, the garbanzo beans and the olives.
Add the lemon juice, olive oil, tamari, and herbs.
Mix everything well so that all parts of the salad are coated with the olive oil and lemon juice.
Let the pasta salad chill and marinate for a while. An hour is good, overnight is better. If you let it hang out overnight, take it out of the fridge at least 15 minutes before serving, so that the pasta can come back up to around room temperature. Gluten-free pasta is generally not very good if it is very cold (although this new DeBole's kind is still good. I ate it straight out of the fridge for breakfast this morning).
Stir well before serving.

Do you know the muffin man?

So the new recipe was a total flop. It's so disappointing, I had such high hopes... It was called "Herbed Tuna in Tomatoes," so basically a stuffed tomato. I finished mine and was just like hm. I wouldn't ever make that again. Which I said in order to give my two friends permission to not eat it any more. And they didn't.

The rest of dinner was very good though. I have been working on another muffin recipe all week, and finally feel like I got the proportions and measurements right so that the muffins turned out really well. They actually even stood the eating at room temperature test.

So I'll share the two recipes.

Heather's Pasta Salad
8 oz box of rice penne pasta
1 box of grape tomatoes
1 can of olives
1 green pepper
1 container of feta cheese
italian salad dressing (This time I used a balsamic vinagrette, it was quite good, although I think usually I do a "zesty italian).

Cook the pasta, then shock it in ice cold water. Drizzle a little of the dressing over it, to keep it from sticking. Cut up the pepper, tomatoes, and olives and add in. Add the crumbled feta. Add a little more dressing. Stir. Enjoy.

Note: with the rice pasta this salad is better at a more room temperature. Rice pasta gets really hard when it is straight out of the fridge. So if you refrigerate it (as you should for food safety), just microwave it for 10-15 seconds.


Orange Juice Muffins
This is a modification of an "Orange Muffin" recipe I found on allrecipes.com
2 cups of "Life Tastes Good Again" gluten-free flour mix
1 tsp xantham gum
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

1 egg
1 1/3 cup orange juice
1/3 cup canola oil

Mix the wet ingredients. Add in the dry ingredients. Mix until just incorporated. (It is very important to not over-mix gluten free flours. It makes them gross). Your dough will be thicker than cake batter and kind of stiff.

Bake at 400 for 20 minutes. Yield 12 muffins.

Put the muffins on a rack to cool. This is important. I left the first batch in the pan to cool and the bottoms got all soggy and that is gross.

UPDATE: What I should have said is that the orange juice muffins stood the test of being fed to non-gluten free people at room temperature. They ate them all. I call that a success.