COTR Night

as my mom calls it. That stands for "Clean Out The Refrigerator" and few things do that as well as a pasta salad. It's a lazy dinner, but a tasty one, and that works for me!

It's no so much a recipe as a rough formula.


Meaty protein - roughly 10%. Chicken, beef, pork, game, mystery meats, what have you. In this case, it was 1/2 a leftover andouille link.

Vegetables - 10-20%. Mine were cucumbers that were starting to look sad, a bunch of cherry tomatoes that were getting squishy, black olives, and some baby lettuces that were starting to wilt. I laid a couple of spoonfuls of the pasta on top of the lettuce for looks, and to keep the liquids in the salad from totally soggifying them.

Some sort of flavory goodness - 5-10% Bacon, sharp cheeses, very flavorful leftovers, pickled things, sundried tomatoes, you know, the good stuff. I waffled between feta and this leftover sharp cheddar, but I have a feta-sprout-tomato sandwich that I make for lunches sometimes, so cheddar it was.

Pasta - 65-75%. This pasta was a gluten-free rice fusilli that I slightly overcooked. :/ I like fusilli or rotini generally, because it grabs the sauce and sticks to the fork well.

I let people dress it with whatever dressing they liked (remember, lazy night) and called it dinner. :) The salad is almost completely gone, and now I have nice big places in my fridge to fill up with good stuff. Yay!