Everything But the Kitchen Sink

My family has a lot of cool cultural heritage: we're Irish/Scottish on my mom's side, and utter mutts on my dad's side: French Canadian, Blackfoot Indian, German, I think. I can't even remember it all now. Because of this mix, I've noticed our food is pretty much always the same stuff at every gathering. It's the same handful of dishes made by the same people with the same ingredients in exactly the same way for the last millenia. My dad's side of the family tends to go for the yummy-comfort-induced-coma foods. I can dig that. Grammie makes awsome grub; she's one of the reasons I became so passionate about cooking. My mom's side is altogether different. The meat is always a bit dry, unless it's turkey, then it's bone dry. Someone always brings a 7 layer salad (for those of you who don't know, it's got peas and lettuce and lots of mayo-sorry, that side is obsessed with losing weight-they use miricle whip-and a bunch of other stuff I'm not sure what it is b/c I only had it once and vowed never again). Lately my aunt has been on a kick with this apple/veg salad. I think it has raisins, apples and spinach and, you guessed it, miricle whip. *shiver* I have taken it upon myself to bring some life to the party. Enter the Family Reunion The perfect venue to WOW some people with my fabulous culinary achievements. I have an amazing turkey recipe from Alton Brown that I made for the holidays last year. I thought, No one really brings turkey, or chicken (they think it's acceptible to bring KFC instead). Aha! I already had, on hand, all I would need to pull this off, except a turkey. No problem. Well, then my well-meaning husband said, "Eh. How about lasagna?" Mkay. I do make a killer laz, but it can be very pricy. So we're at Save-a-Lot, picking up what we can for as cheap as possile (hey, my laz weighs like 20lbs!) I'm not getting sausage (the secret ingredient to omg laz.), and we're already spending over $20, over half of our grocery budget that day. Mr. "How about laz?" is having a kitten about spending all that $$ on other people! *Sigh* It all goes back on the shelves; the 2 boxes of noodles, the 2lbs of cheese, the canned tomatoes... I pick up instead a can of olives, garbonzos, and 2 boxes of rotini. Fine, I say. I pasta salad. Mmmm. (Note the sarcasm) So here it is: A really tasty pasta salad that nobody but me ate because we got to the reunion an hour late... 2 boxes of rotini 1 HUGE can garbonzo beans 1 can black olives, roughly diced 1 can corn 1 can black beans 1/2 a red onion, finely diced 5-6 mature carrots, lightly boiled till soft, and sliced diagonally 4-5 cloves garlic, smashed and finely diced a palmful of cilantro a palmful of red pepper flakes a bottle of italian dressing Cook it, mix it, eat it. Note, no mayo.