Summer Salads

We love summer pasta salads as they are easy to make and take along. For picnics, concerts in the park and an easy meal, pasta salads can be made ahead and are great for "assemble your own salad".

For those following a gluten-free diet, substituting a gluten-free pasta product is great too!

Holden Arboretum has a Tuesday supper time concert series. I made this pasta salad to pack in our cooler, added some cherries for dessert and my husbands favorite picnic drink, orange lemonade, made with a ratio of 1:1 of orange juice and real lemonade.

Everyone including my 94 year young Mom enjoyed the orange, lemonade.


My sister brought some yummy Greek butter cookies to nibble on during the concert!

For a most generous serving of pasta salad for the four of us, I cooked about 1/2 pound pasta, gluten free pasta may be used, 3 small chicken tenders and a generous helping of peas. I chopped up our favorite fresh vegetables including a whole red pepper, sweet orange and yellow peppers, 1/2 of a medium sized cucumber (I remove the seeds), about two tablespoons of sweet onion and a garden fresh tomato.

Before placing the pasta with the cut up onion, tomato, cucumber and peppers in a quart container, I added Italian and Asian Toasted Light Sesame salad dressing, a bit more than one would normally put on a salad as the peas and other fresh vegetables are added later to each plate, according to each person's preferences. Any of your favorite salad dressing would work!

I kept the chicken cooled in a baggie, separate from the cooked pasta, peppers, cucumber and onion included in the quart container, thus making the meal appropriate for a vegan. For those that love vegetables, I included a baggy of sliced radishes and more sliced cucumbers in our little cooler. Olives, celery, carrots are also welcome additions to pasta salad. I include hard boiled eggs too for those like Mom that love an egg at a picnic.

To serve, I assemble each person's favorite veggies with the basic pasta and chopped vegetable dressed entree, adding the chicken, peas and radishes (if desired) on top of the salad. Serves 4-5.

The great thing about this meal is that the quart container fits easily in our middle-sized Playmate cooler and the other items in baggies fit nicely around the container. The entire meal, paper plates and utensils fit in the cooler, only the orange lemonade was not in the cooler.

A trick to making the orange lemonade is adding ice cubes instead of all the water required to make orange juice and lemonade from frozen concentrate. Adding a bit less water than needed and adding extra ice keeps the drink from thinning too much from the melted ice cubes. The ice cubes also keep the drink cold for the evening.

We had a great time with our family at the concert in the garden!

Gadgets - Zester

One of my useful gadgets is a zester. My mother told me she loved the cookies that I made for her, the ones having a lingering aroma of citrus. I call my recipe:

Andrew David's Orchestra Cookies: a Zesty Dough


Zest from two tangerines/oranges/lemon (optional)

Cream 2 sticks of butter (I soften it slightly in the microwave if necessary)
Add 1 1/2 cups of sugar and continue creaming the butter and sugar (important step)
Add 3 whole eggs to the mixture
Add 1 tsp vanilla
Add 1/8 cup milk (an alternative is about 2 Tablespoons of Lemon Juice + Zest)
Add 3 1/2 - scant 4 cups of flour to make a stiff dough remembering to
Include 2 teaspoons of baking powder in the flour (I use unbleached flour)
Mix and place the dough in the refrigerator for a few hours or overnight, be sure the dough is covered so that it does not dry out in the refrigerator.

After refrigeration for at least three hours, I take out some of the dough and hand roll it into one inch balls. I slightly dampen my hands as the dough becomes sticky. I place the one inch cookie dough balls on a cookie sheet (I use the silicone covers on my cookie sheets and nothing sticks to the pans).

As the dough is not overly sweet, one can add jams, nuts or a chocolate kiss to each cookie by pressing the kiss into the round ball or making a thumb print in the cookie ball and filling it with a jam. We like rasberry and apricot preserves in our cookies as the flavors and colors are appealing. One can also press a favorite nut, such as a pecan into the round cookie balls.

The cookie balls will spread out so leave two inches between the cookies and bake for about 15-18 minutes in a preheated 350 F oven until the bottom of the cookie becomes slightly brown. Do not over bake, the cookie will remain very light.

The recipe makes from 80-96 cookies depending upon the size of the small ball one hand rolls. The dough may also be rolled in larger long rolls and cut. The nice thing about this dough is one need not use a rolling pin or cookie cutters.

I usually make one tray with chocolate kisses, one with nuts, one with apricot jam and a tray with rasberry jam. This cookie dough does not crack when a chocolate candy kiss or nut is pressed into the raw cookie dough before baking or if the cookie is indented with a thumb print, something that might appeal to children helping to place their thumb prints in the cookie before adding jam or preserves.

At our house, when we eat a piece of citrus fruit, I wash the peel vigorously and collect the zest before peeling the fruit. I have the zest on hand for baking and find that it replaces the need for salt in many recipes. I am trying to get my 90 year young Mom to gain weight and decrease her need for salting everything by substituting a citrus flavor. She often says "I will eat it if you do, as it is more fun to eat with someone than eating alone". Thus, I gain weight and Mom does not gain a single pound.

The cookies with a chocolate candy kiss in the middle of each cookie, sold at a recent bake sale benefiting my nephew's school orchestra. Next year I will make a tray including all four types of cookies by cutting a long roll of cookie dough into 1/3 inch rounds and including all four cookies on one tray of cookies. One dough recipe makes four unique tasting cookies that also look appealing.