Antipasti Pasta Salad with Kale and Radish

Fresh Spring vegetables tossed with marinated preserved vegetables, fresh herbs, pasta and cheese for a cool and quick vegetarian supper

If it's an Italian faux pas to say "antipasti pasta" I apologize.  All blame belongs to me.  I'm pretty sure that pasta antipasti is clearly wrong, but I'm thinking 'before the pasta-pasta' is OK.  Point is that I'm using traditional antipasti ingredients, combined with fresh spring vegetables, to make a tasty supper. Call it a multitasking meal--you've got your antipasti and your pasta course in one.

You know, I did make a title image for Pinterest purposes.  May as well share it even though I changed the post title after I'd made it.  Dithering--not a good thing after 2 hard ciders!

This is a great 'it's too hot, I don't want to think about cooking dinner' dish, as well as a Fast From The Farm Share meal.  It uses kale, radishes, and green onions from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm share as well as a swing by your grocery store's olive bar for the rest (no grocery store olive bar? The jarred items keep for a while and are worthwhile to purchase).  If you boil the pasta while you're fixing your morning beverage, you can be out of the kitchen in a flash.

When we moved here we bought a gas stove. [And a house to go with it. In that order.]  Getting the gas line installed took some doing--city permits and all that.  Using an electric skillet, a crock pot, an electric kettle, a toaster and a grill I fixed family meals for weeks.  I learned a cheater way of making pasta salads by buying the fastest cooking fresh pasta and using my kettle to boil the water then 'steep' the pasta for a few minutes.  It was an easy meal our first summer here, and something that keeps the kitchen cool even when the oven works just fine.

I'd been thinking about adding kale to a pasta salad for a while, and when I saw some marked-down olive bar containers I knew I'd go in an antipasti direction.  This would also be great in a more Mediterranean direction, later in the summer, if you got feta instead, and added fresh cucumbers and tomatoes when they are ripe.  The sun-dried tomatoes and marinated mozzarella make such a pretty bowl with the kale and radishes.  If you'd like, add some chopped cured meat or white beans for extra protein.

Strawberry Salsa with Hatch Chiles {Cantina Style}

Cantina Style Strawberry Salsa with Hatch Chiles--a tangy combination of sweet and heat, perfect for dipping thin & crispy tortilla chips and endlessly snacking

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My spouse and I are getting into those super-thin tortilla chips--restaurant or cantina style--that go so well with the aptly named cantina style [liquid, not chunky] salsa. While we were out having margaritas last month I was mindlessly chowing down on that stuff.  The deceptively small bowls make me not realize how often I was digging in--but it's so good!  Don't get me wrong, I love a nice chunky salsa as well--those sturdy chips need something to do after all--and it's terrific mixed in with scrambled eggs, Taco Rice, oh the chunky salsa uses list goes on . . .

I love my mindless snacking, though, and when that involves the sweet + heat that is this salsa, well, it's a thing of beauty.

I thought this up while driving 500 miles home last week.  I had 4 quarts of strawberries (tip o' the hat to AnnieRie for the Larriland suggestion) and a trash bag full of kale my dad had harvested from his garden.  I also had Wee Oliver Picklepants as my only company, and his back is hurting so he wasn't saying much [hashtagmiddle-agedruntywienerdogproblems].  I also kept forgetting to switch CDs when I'd stop, and didn't want to flip through the selections while driving, so I pretty much occupied myself with thinking up strawberry and kale recipes all 8+ hours of driving. You've been warned.

I was concerned about sending the wrong message about the visible rings in this photo-they are now off for storage.

I knew I wanted to 1) use strawberries, 2) make a spicy salsa, using the last of the roasted Hatch chiles I picked up at my local grocery store and froze last August, 3) make a restaurant style salsa and 4) can my salsa, so I thought it would be a cinch to find a recipe in the Giant Recipe Book That Is The Internet.  You know what?  No luck.  Sure--if I wanted a chunky salsa, a fresh salsa, or a sweet salsa for dipping with cinnamon chips I'd be set.  But I had my parameters and I was stickin' to them.

Off to my trusty library and Marisa McClellan's trusty Food In Jars cookbook.  There, I adapted her peach salsa recipe--one that she says is essentially an adaptation of her tomato salsa recipe--to use what I had on hand.  I also started it off in the blender because I knew I wanted a smooth salsa [and I'm lazy].

One nice side effect I wasn't expecting--the strawberry DNA [coolest 7th grade at home science project ever] thickens with the vinegar to make a salsa that clings nicely to the chip and doesn't slide immediately off like some restaurant salsas I've had.

For more recipes using Hatch chile peppers, please see my Hatch Chile Recipes Collection. For more recipes using strawberries, please see my Strawberry Recipes Collection. These collections are part of the Visual Recipe Index by Ingredient, a resource for folks like me eating from the farm share, the farmer's market, the garden, the neighbor's garden, and great deals on ugly produce at the grocery store.



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Roasted Garlic & Pesto Buttermilk Pizza Dough--on Fathers and Gardening

A tender wheaty buttermilk pizza dough flavored with homegrown roasted garlic and prepared pesto

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Part 1:  An Old Farmer's Advice on Gardening

My dad was a guerrilla gardener before it was hip. [Is it uncool to say hip? Is it uncool to say uncool?] If Johnny Appleseed was known for planting apple trees, then Freddy Daffodilbulb would be my dad's nickname.  It's kind of unwieldy, though, so I'll stick with Dad.  My dad has stealthily--or blatantly--planted daffodil bulbs from Delaware to Ohio.  That's a pretty cool legacy.

When I was a little kid, my parents worked to turn our suburban backyard into an edible landscape.  [Homesteaders before that was cool, too.] The old small inground pool was filled in and turned into a bed for rhubarb, herbs, and bulbs.  I remember being pretty little and getting to use a hammer (!) to break up the concrete patio which became a strawberry patch.  It seemed like every year the amount of grass got smaller and the land in food production enlarged. We had cherry and apple trees in addition to that strawberry patch, and 2 areas of vegetables. **