Name: Pasta Salad
Prep time: 10 min
Cook time: 10 min
Total time: 20 min
Ingredients: 16 ounces Fusilli pasta (cooked and cooled); 5 ounces green olives (sliced); 1/4 cup black olives (sliced); 1 small red onion (diced); 3/4 cup shredded cheddar cheese; 1/2 cup pepperoni slices (quartered); 1/2 cup Italian salad dressing

Admittedly, this recipe is a little cheaty, but this is a super easy pasta salad for other mama’s like me!

I’m about to completely change the way you think about me, but you know what? I’m okay with that. I’m all about keeping things real.

This story starts a long time ago. Like 21 years ago-ish. I was around 8. I had a friend. She was at my house one summer day and we had a brilliant plan. You see, we had a craving. Not for sugar or chocolate or soda or any of those other foods that normal 8 year old girls might crave.

We wanted Kraft Seven Seas Viva Italian salad dressing, which, by the way, has been discontinued. To say this saddens me is an understatement. (Update: It has not been discontinued, but is extremely difficult to find, for some reason!)

Back to the plan.

We wanted salad dressing. We just didn’t want lettuce. I mean, come on, lettuce totally cramps salad dressing’s style, am I right?

You’ll love this easy pasta salad recipe!

Knowing that my parents probably wouldn’t understand our desire to drink salad dressing, we very quietly snuck into the kitchen when they weren’t looking. We found two sandwich baggies, grabbed the salad dressing from the fridge, and gave the bottle a couple of good squeezes right into each baggy. Then we nonchalantly walked, probably while innocently whistling, to the far reaches of my backyard, behind the apple tree.

That’s when we put the baggies up to our lips and drank.

It was…not as good as we had hoped. We suffered through it though and drank every last drop of that salad dressing. Then we hid the baggys under some bushes. We would have liked to burn the evidence, but my parents probably would have spotted the smoke.

I was a strange child.

I also used to eat my mama’s bath salts. What? They were delicious.

Anyway, because this pasta salad is loaded with my favorite salad dressing, eating it always takes me back to that sunny day, on the hill behind our apple tree, drinking salad dressing out of a baggy. Those were the days, my friends. Those were the days.