Turning odds and ends into delicious meals is a core skill for a home cook. In this recipe, I transform the oil from sun dried tomatoes into a delicious pasta salad.

Time: 3/5
Prepped, cooked and cleaned in less than an hour, with potential for further telescoping of tasks.

Effort: 3/5
Shortcut aside, you still need to boil some water.

Rags to Riches

I’ve always held the opinion that making use of leftover ingredients is one of the most valuable skills of a home cook.

A while ago, I used an almost-expired jar of sun dried tomatoes from the bargain bin to meal prep a week’s worth of Marry Me Chicken with rice. The tomatoes came in a generous amount of oil, which was an enemy in that recipe, soaking into my cutting board and making the cleanup more frustrating than I expected.

But given another context, that delicious, herby, garlicky oil becomes a good friend. Because the oil is already heavily seasoned, it gets me halfway to a flavourful salad dressing with very little work. All I had to do was to whisk the oil with some acid, plus some mustard to emulsify it – it’s the same idea as using pickle juice as a shortcut in this other pasta salad I made.

And just like that, I stretched the leftovers of a bargain bin deal into another week of lunches. Now, this post is not so much about the specific recipe, but rather about illustrating the principle behind the idea and to demonstrate the execution.

Other tricks

I’m also quite proud of several hacks that I successfully implemented. The first is to make efficient use of time and energy. By using the same water that I blanched my vegetables in for cooking the pasta, I managed to avoid burning extra gas and waiting around to bring a second pot of water to boil.

I was also able to minimise the cleaning up I needed to do by doing most of the cooking in the same stainless steel pan, then making the dressing right inside of it, as well as using it as a mixing bowl to combine the rest of the ingredients.

The final innovation (if you could call it that) has to do with the onion. While I wanted the onion to provide some crunch and texture to the salad, I didn’t want it to be completely raw and overpower the salad with its pungent bite. You see, I wasn’t brought up eating raw vegetables, except maybe cucumbers in a wood ear mushroom salad. That’s why I was blanching the veg in the first place. 

What I did was to mix the veggies into the raw onion slices right after the blanching. And I’m happy to report that it worked like a charm. The residual heat went into the onions and took off the raw edge, while the onions acted as a heat sink to cool the veggies down.

Whether you replicate this pasta salad at home, or apply the techniques and principles to another recipe, I hope you gained something from this post!

Posts since the last recipe that was actually served with rice: 2

Dramatis Personae

Served 6.

• 500g fusilli , or pasta shape of choice
• 1kg boneless skinless chicken breasts
• 2 zucchini
• 1 carrot
• 1 red onion
• Salt and pepper to taste

For the dressing 

• 100ml oil from sun dried tomatoes
• 100ml vinegar, or to taste
• 2 tbsp mustard
• Black pepper to taste

Executive summary

1. Sous vide frozen chicken breasts for 2 hours on 60C/140F.
2. Wash and cut the vegetables while bringing water to a boil. Place onion slices in the bottom of a big bowl. 
3. Blanche carrots and zucchini until done to your liking. Remove to the bowl, on top of the onions. 
4. With the same water, cook pasta according to package instructions, then remove from the pan and drain well.
5. In the same pan, mix the dressing ingredients together. Add pasta and vegetables, and mix to combine.
6. Serve warm, or refrigerate overnight and serve chilled.

Play by Play

Last things first. Sous vide chicken breasts straight from frozen are so much easier – no raw chicken juices, no flopping around. Just add an hour to the usual cooking time.

Next it’s blanching the vegetables. They’re about 1 to 1 in terms of volume to the pasta.

And here’s the first trick. Onions on the bottom, hot vegetables on top. I have it a toss so the onion slices get some proximity with the heat to take the raw edge off.

Same pan, same water, but it’s the pasta’s time to take a hot bath.

Pasta’s done and draining. Now the second trick: same pan, no water. Dressing ingredients go in and gets whisked together into an emulsion.

Still the same pan, but now it’s a mixing bowl. The pasta and vegetables go back in to get tossed with the dressing, while the chicken breasts get cut into serving sized pieces.

Ta-daaa! A week’s worth of lunches with just a night’s worth of dishes to do. The herby oil from the sun dried tomatoes were well seasoned enough that it didn’t need much more than some acid to become a serviceable dressing.

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