8/18 Hot Summer-Cool Salad
It has been the most amazing Michigan summer I can ever remember. It has been scorching and sunny and the sky has perpetually been the most dramatic hue of blue. For me it has been the best days of the very best season. One of my favorite things about summer is craving salads. I love to make biggy big salads out of pasta, fruit, lettuce whatever we’ve got. If you have ever experienced the bleak frozen tundra of winter like we have in Michigan, then you completely understand how in February, when the sun has been dead and eulogized for five months…you are almost incapable craving salad. It is frozen out of your DNA for at least another three months. My desire for an entirely chilled meal gets packed away with my flip flops and favorite shorts.
So today I decided to make a bean and pasta salad from a mix I have from The Art of Good Food.
Photo By: S. Duquet
I have raved about them before. They are a family business from Montana creating vegetarian/vegan mixes for soups, salad dressings, breadsticks and cookies. You create the dishes from their mixes and look like a culinary genius. Even better, their mixes are hand crafted in small batches using only organic and wholesome ingredients purchased from certified organic growers and suppliers.
Photo By: S. Duquet
This time I used their Glacier Park Pink Soup mix. It is bountiful with things like, pink pintos, red chili beans, mustard herbs and pasta. On their website they have recipe suggestions to create dishes with their mixes that have nothing to do with their original intention. Thus…soup mix becomes cold bean/pasta salad.
I cooked the beans and the pasta, threw in a bunch of ingredients that I had on hand like peppers, olives and corn and watched as a scrumptious, healthful summer dish took shape.
What I did:
Prepared the beans and the pasta according to the recipe link (see below)
Divided a bit more than half the cooked beans for the salad and set aside the rest. Mix the larger portion of beans and all the pasta together.
What I added to the beans and pasta:
1 Diced yellow pepper
1/2 Can of black olives chopped
1/4 Cup of green olives chopped
1/2 Cup plus 1Tbsp. of bottled zesty lite Italian dressing
3/4 Cup of corn
1 Tsp dried dill
salt and pepper to taste
Photo By: S. Duquet
The finished salad is savory and flavorful. Because the beans are created from scratch, they are infused with a smoky, slow cooked vibe. I really love that it tastes new and different than any other bean/pasta salad I have ever tasted. It is a hipper version of old school beans.
An added bonus of using the mix in this way is that once I had married as many of the cooked beans as I wanted with pasta and other ingredients, I still had enough of the beautifully cooked and spiced beans to have the next day with rice. It is a two for one.
This makes enough bean salad for your entire neighborhood, so have another cookout or pot luck while the weather is gorgeous. Here is a direct link to the recipe I followed and modified to serve our taste buds. Glacier Park Pink Salad.
Our friends at The Art of Good Food have generously offered a 10% discount for all orders shipped in the US, on all of their products on their site:www.theartofgoodfood.com. Enter the following code at checkout: VEGAN10
The offer is good through March of 2011.
Enjoy and have a delicious day.
Tags: compassionate eating, dairy free, Glacier Park Pink Soup, going veg, the art of good food, trying vegan, trying vegetarian, vegan, vegan bean salad, vegan challenge, vegan entree, vegan experience, vegan lunch salad, vegan products, vegan recipe, vegan wannabe
