Pasta Salad: Trader Joe's Components

Typically, doing all your shopping for a meal at one place means compromising on either the cost or the quality of some of the components. I'm lucky to have many grocery store chains, as well as farmer's market and bakery options, to find my ingredients. Ideally, I shop in a nomadic way, getting guacamole from TJs, salsa from Safeway, meat from one of the smaller places that only carries Painted Hills (because they won't have a lower quality for specials). That requires a lot of time and traveling.

So I have an ongoing challenge to myself to take the components from any one place to make a meal. For the last few years, I've had the extra challenge of not having a real kitchen to cook in, only plug-in appliances and a small refrigerator. This has meant that I eat a lot of simple salads, using oil and vinegar as a dressing.

That wasn't going to work when I needed a ready-made entree to take to a party. I needed to make something where I wouldn't be stuck trying to store lots of leftover ingredients. I feel that I succeeded in this pasta salad because it covered these bases:

1. total ingredients bought in a $20 shopping trip
2. minimal cooking
3. simple prep/short time to prep
4. varied and tasty
5. organic ingredients
6. vegetarian
7. good for hot weather

This recipe makes good use of Trader Joe's package sizes. You'll need something to cook pasta (appliance and pot or dish), refrigeration or other cold-holding, containers for cut vegetables, a zester/peeler if you have one, a cutting board, and a knife.

Because I used the marination from the mozzarella as the dressing, to make a dairy free/vegan version of this, you would need to substitute in a vegan dressing with garlic and herbs as well as leaving out the two cheeses.

Cooling the cooked pasta apart from the raw veges allowed the marinate flavor to sink in to the cooked ingredients. I didn't have any large containers, so I had to use several. This is how I split it up for travel. It was assembled at the final destination.

A) penne, broccoli, parmesan cheese, peppers, cherry tomatoes

B) cucumber, carrots

C) mozzarella

D) olive can unopened

TJ Trip Pasta Salad

Organic Penne Rigate, dry, 8oz (half of the package)

Organic broccoli (1 package crowns or crowns from 1 stem)

Purple carrots (2 from package of organic rainbow carrots), thinly sliced 

1 organic cucumber, seeded and thinly sliced

4 mini bell peppers (from 8oz package of baby bell peppers, red to yellow), slivered

Organic cherry tomatoes (3/4 of a 10oz package) cut in half

12 oz Marinated Mozzarella (small mozzarella balls in oil/herb/vinegar marinade)

Slivered parmesan cheese, about 1 oz (to taste)

Sea salt (to taste)

Cook 8oz of penne in a saucepan for 7 minutes, or until cooked but still very firm. For me, this means:

boil water in an electric kettlepouring enough water to cover the penne in the pot, cover with lidstart timerleave the covered pot on a hot plate until there's a rolling boil, turn off the hot plate

Add the cut broccoli crown pieces directly into the pot. Cover and cook for 3 minutes. (If you are using whole broccoli, save the stem! Cut away the hard outer layer and slice the tender middle for stir fry or soup.)

Drain. Pour 2 Tablespoons of the mozzarella marinade into the mixture; stir until coated evenly. Cool for 1-2 hours in the refrigerator. After cooling, add salt to taste.

Cut up the rest of the vegetables after washing. Thinly slice the carrot into elongated coins. Use the zester to peel furrows into the skin of the cucumber before slicing, then seed (if desired) and slice thinly.

Select four (about 4 oz) of the baby bell peppers, orange and yellow. Cut off the tops, slice in half lengthwise, and scrape out all seeds. Slice each half against the grain into slivers. Cut each cherry tomato in half.

Assemble: cooled pasta, broccoli, parmesan, vegetables. Add the marinated mozzarella balls. Spoon out the herb mixture from the marinade over the cheese, but not the rest of the marinade liquid. (Save for future salad dressing.) Drain the olives and add them in.

Makes 4 entree portions or party food for 8.

Kale & Garlic Chicken Soup

Kale & Garlic Chicken Soup

2 TBL oil

5 cloves of fresh garlic, minced

3 TBL tomato paste

3 Cups homemade chicken stock*

1 tsp lemon juice*

1 lb fingerling potatoes, cut into 1” pieces

½ Cup shredded carrot

salt to taste

½ a bunch of frilly kale, chopped

1 Cup of cooked chickpeas

2 Cups shredded cooked chicken, mostly dark meat

This is one of those what-do-I-have recipes. I don’t have any problem with someone buying all the ingredients specifically to make a soup, but soup can be so forgiving and flexible that, to me, it’s the kind of thing you make when you are trying to make order out of chaos.

Chicken stock is something I pretty much always have on hand. I make it out of the bones of every roasted chicken, including rotisserie chickens from the grocery store. My freezer holds stock ends (carrot butts, garlic and onion trim, mushroom stems, ginger, celery surplus, and sometimes bell pepper seeds and membranes) and I always have bay leaves. To make stock, I basically use Alton Brown’s Bird to the Last Drop recipe, without adding the finishing details of the soup. I never measure anything! The chicken bones, vege stock ends, and bay leaf go into a pot that will hold it all, then I cover it with water and simmer it for half an hour. I let everything cool enough to handle, then strain. (If you are making vege stock, you get the richest flavor by letting it cool completely before straining.) I don’t worry about the fat, because it will harden in the refrigerator. I can scrape it before using the stock.

This particular stock gets an asterisk because it wasn’t normal stock. When I roasted the half chicken (for the meat for the soup) yesterday, instead of putting an inch of water at the bottom of the roasting pan, I used chicken stock. So this “stock” had all the drippings from a chicken rubbed with blackening spices and spritzed with lemon juice. Cold, it was thick and gelatinous. This makes an awesome base for gravy and adds that marrow goodness to the soup. Because the lemon flavored the base, I didn’t add any additional lemon. If using store-bought or plain homemade stock, I strongly recommend lemon juice or lemon salt with leafy green soups. It brings the tomato, greens, and beans/chickpeas together really well.

I’m going to admit that I used the scraped chicken fat from the stock to sautee the garlic. A lot of that fat was the red palm oil that I used on the roasted chicken. This stuff is super deliciously amazing and not to be wasted: Nutiva Red Palm Oil

1. Sautee the minced garlic in the oil until the garlic is aromatic, about 1 minute. Add the tomato paste and cook for another minute. Add the stock.

2. Allow the liquid to come to a simmer. Add the potatoes. Add the carrots.

3. Simmer 30 minutes or until the potatoes are tender (but not falling apart).

4. Meanwhile, cut up your kale and chicken.

5. When the potatoes are cooked, taste your soup. Add salt if needed. Add the kale and chickpeas. Continue to simmer on low heat, covered, for 10 more minutes.

6. Add your chicken. Give it just long enough to get warm, then serve your marvelous soup.

I enjoyed mine with some crusty sourdough bread. It had a full flavor, with sourness from the tomato paste and the lemon that worked well with the other ingredients. A lot of kale soups ask for chopped tomatoes, but I'm glad I didn't have any because I think they would have overwhelmed the tender little potatoes. It was also a pretty soup, thick with ingredients and pretty in color.