Caramelized fennel and shallot pasta salad with orange balsamic vinaigrette
Winter pasta salad, anyone?
I’d be remiss if I wrote this newsletter without mentioning what’s been going on around me this week. When I filmed and photographed this recipe on Tuesday morning, LA was a different place. The winds were just starting to pick up and, by the time the final dish had been photographed, we were hearing the first of the fire in Pacific Palisades that would end up devastating that entire community. The Eaton Fire had not even begun yet.
My family and I are safe in our home and have not had to evacuate, but the same cannot be said of so many. If you’d like to help, you can donate to the Los Angeles Fire Department Foundation. GoFundMe has also put together a list of verified GoFundMe’s where you can donate directly to families that have lost everything. My heart goes out to each and every person that has been affected by this. It is truly unimaginable, truly a nightmare. In my entire 34 years of living in LA, I’ve never seen anything of this magnitude.
Thank you to everyone who has checked in on my family and me. While I didn’t feel 100% comfortable carrying on with business as usual this week, I know a lot of you pay for and expect my recipes, so I’ve decided to send this one out anyways. Please know that was not a decision I took lightly.
Welcome to Weeknights Done Right, a series where I’m sharing simple, wholesome recipes with lots of staying power. AKA, things you can make once, pair with various components, and eat for days to come. My kind of meal prep. Non-boring, fresh, full of flavor ways to make putting together a meal a breeze.
If I’m going to be honest, I haven’t felt like cooking much lately. I love to cook, obviously — it’s my favorite way to unwind and be creative. A glass of wine in hand, some Norah Jones playing softly in the background, my husband and I in a relaxed dance around the kitchen, prepping and sautéing and plating and pouring.
But rushing to just get something on the table as quickly as possible without having time to enjoy the process? Not really for me. No time to slow down, no time to think through what I’m craving and how I can make it the most delicious. Just stressful and unfulfilling.
Which is why I’ve been turning to meal prep. But, meal prep my way. I can’t eat the same thing over and over and over again but I can take different pre-made components and put them together a few different ways to create meal after meal that’s delicious, deeply satisfying, and takes very little time to throw together.
Last week I shared the meatball recipe that sustains us for at least five days every time we make it, and this week I’m sharing a pasta salad recipe that gets better as it sits in the fridge and proves that pasta salad really *should* be made and enjoyed year-round.
Tell me more
To be honest, I’ve never understood why pasta salad is considered a summer thing. I mean, I get it on the most basic level (cold salad, warm weather, easy to make ahead and transport to outdoor activities, etc.), but I’m not one to save things for only certain occasions.
Which is why I make pasta salad year-round, just with a few tweaks. Like using roasted seasonal produce and ditching the mayo-based dressing for something a bit more interesting and exciting.
Today’s recipe is a winter pasta salad if I’ve ever tasted one. There’s roasted shallots and fennel, which offer both sweet and savory notes, as well as toasted nuts, cheese, olives, and perhaps the standout of the whole dish, a to-die-for orange balsamic vinaigrette that is so unexpected it kind of smacks you in your taste buds when you first take a bite. In the best way.
Cook this today or tomorrow and you’ll be set for days to come. Or maybe less, if you’re like me and find yourself taking a few bites every time you open the fridge. No shame in that, just make a little extra. Your rushed, hangry self will thank you come lunch or dinner.
A note on dressings (and recipes, in general)
As a recipe developer, you might be surprised when I say that I think you should take recipes as a set of suggestions rather than rules.
I’ve done the work of coming up with a dish that tastes delicious, but it’s up to you to make it your own. Everyone’s taste buds are *so* different, so it’s hard for me to think of any recipe as being perfect because, well, how can we be sure that my perfect and your perfect are the same?
I think this is especially true with dressings and sauces because they’re flavoring the whole dish. You might like yours a little sweeter than I do, whereas someone else might like it to be almost not sweet at all but with lots more acidity. And don’t even get me started on salt… I almost never include measurements for salt because everyone’s salt preferences are just so different.
All this to say — taste your food as you go and adjust it according to how you want it to taste. And if you’re not sure how to do that, make it as I’ve written but make note of what you might change as you’re eating it. A little less orange zest next time? A touch more lemon? Pistachios instead of walnuts, goat’s cheese instead of parm. Maybe you might even add in something I haven’t — garlic, green onions, thinly sliced celery, golden raisins, maple syrup, cayenne pepper. This is where cooking becomes fun. I plan to do a whole newsletter on intuitive cooking but this is where it starts: listening to your taste buds and having fun with it.
Before we start
This pasta salad can be eaten warm or straight out of the fridge. For the first option, just mix the freshly-roasted veggies with your freshly-cooked pasta. Both will naturally cool as you mix since we’re not doing it in a pan over heat, but the residual heat will help meld the ingredients together and warm the dressing juuuust a little. Whatever’s left can be refrigerated and it’s just as good cold.
Feel free to add in a protein or use a higher protein pasta, like chickpea or lentil, here to make it more of a meal-in-one.
How to make this a component meal: I like to serve this pasta salad with something like my meatballs, rotisserie chicken, a tin of fish, leftover steak, or a sausage on the side or even an egg on top, if that’s your thing. Add some kind of extra veggies on the side — a leafy green salad, some broccolini that I have left over, even just a sliced cucumber — as well as some avocado. Helllooooo, perfect component meal.
This will stay for about five days in the fridge. The recipe uses half a box of pasta, and it gave my husband and I about 4-5 meals total (again, this is using it as part of a meal, not as the whole). Double or triple it for more staying power.
The recipe
Serves: 4-5
Cook time: 45 minutes
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