Comfort Food: Pasta Salad

I have to explain why this is a comfort food. I have decided pretty early in my mom-days, that dinner is the most important thing I can do in a day. If nothing else goes right, I want to be able to sit down with my family for dinner. Because of that, I've gotten into the habit of making most of my meals, as much as possible, in the morning. I use my crockpot a lot, make casseroles and stick them in the fridge, etc. This meal is my favorite because I can get it totally and completely done in the morning. There is no last minute prep stuff for it, like there is for a lot of my other meals. It makes me happy to know that dinner is ready. And, my kids absolutely love this one. There is something in it that everyone will eat.

So, the recipe. We like to use shells, but you can pick any fun pasta you want. Boil it, strain it, and then immediately cool it with cold water. Dump a little ranch dressing in, just enough to coat the noodles. Then, stick it in the fridge to finish cooling. (You coat the noodles so that they don't stick to each other.)

While that cools, chop up whatever you want to put in it. We do a meat (chicken, ham, or deli meats), veggies (tomatos, cucumbers, celery, carrots), cubed cheese, olives, whatever else sounds good. This is the nice part, because if kids interupt you, you can stop, attend to them, and come back to it. There is no time limit on this step.

Dump stuff into the noodles. Add more ranch, and then, add some italian salad dressing. Trust me, it gives it the perfect zing. I'd say mine end up with about 2 parts ranch to 1 part italian, but there is no measurements.

If your in my house, the last step is to make sure Seth doesn't keep snitching from the bowl throughout the day.

These make great leftovers, too. When we are going to have a few days of back to back craziness, or if I just don't know how many people I'll be feeding, when, I make this up, and then it is there, ready for whoever needs to eat whenever.