Pasta Salad!!

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Whoa!

My friend Katie and I put together the most amazing pasta salad just a few minutes ago.  We already had a pound or so of Rotini in the house, and a bottle of pitted olives, some Pepper Jack cheese, some Grated Parmesan, and lots of other odds and ends we could throw into a pasta salad, but Katie wanted also Pepperoni, and I wanted some Yellow zucchini squash.  We were improvising from the outset, but I had made lots of pasta salad over the years, and so had she, but we had never put one together together, if you know what I mean.

1.  The first thing I did, as always, was to take the nine slices of pepperoni (roughly 1½ ounces of 1" pepperoni slices), quarter them, peel them apart, lay them on paper towels, and microwave them for about 9 seconds.  Some of the fat sort of melts out and soaks into the paper towels.

2.  The yellow squash was going to be sliced and thrown in, but I decided to slice it, quarter the slices (actually, we quartered the squash lengthwise first: a foot-long baby yellow squash), and soak them for a couple of minutes in vinegar and salt.  Just a cup of vinegar with a teaspoon of salt.  Katie tasted a slice after the minute, and liked it.  She said we could soak them longer, but I insisted that this was enough, for no good reason.  (It's good to do this sort of enigmatic thing every once in a while; it reinforces your reputation as a culinary genius.)

3.  It was multi-flavored rotini from the health-food store: there was tomato flavored rotini, and other flavors; anyway, there was yellow, green, red and white rotini.  This is usually a good choice, even if health-food-store rotini is ridiculously expensive.  You boil the stuff the usual way, making sure it isn't too soft when you're finished.

4.  We sliced the pitted olives (about 15 stuffed, pitted olives), and cubed the pepper-jack cheese (about a ½ inch slab from a 1-pound block) into ¼ " cubes.

5.  Katie wanted hard-boiled eggs.  (We used 3.)  This seemed a little different; I mean, who puts hard-boiled eggs in pasta salad?  Evidently the Katie Culinary School believes in this.  So the eggs were actually boiling alongside the pasta, and then cooled, shelled, and sort of cubed.

6.  This next ingredient made a huge difference: sun-dried tomatoes.  Katie insisted on getting the dry stuff, in plastic bags, and not the stuff soaked in oil, in jars.  They're sort of pruney-looking strips of tomato, like tomato jerky.  She chopped them into smallish strips.

7.  We rinsed the pasta in cold water, put it in a big mixing bowl, and added everything except the eggs and cheese.  We added a little salt, Jane's Crazy Mixed-Up Pepper, and ordinary black pepper to taste,  We also added 1 tablespoon of olive oil, that's all, honest.  Toss it all together.  Each of us added grated Parmesan to taste.

We thought it was totally fabulous, despite the infinitesimal quantities of salt and oil used.  The eggs seem sinfully decadent to me, but they really made the dish.  There is enough for 4, certainly, and if there isn't, you guys are eating way too much.  Manga!

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