Spaghetti Salad

Every once in a while we try a new recipe that sounds fantastic and turns out to be a total clunker.  So it was one evening recently.  I'd pulled a recipe off of Foodbuzz for a shrimp pasta dish.  It had shrimp, tomato paste, white wine, lemon, cheese, garlic...  What could go wrong with that?  Well, let me tell you - lemon.  No, LEMON.  That flavor just plain took over.  We couldn't taste anything else.  Connie assumed I'd toss the whole mess.  But, not on your life was I going to toss all that shrimp.  And, the pasta was perfectly usable.  Into a colander it all went.  Once the spray setting on the faucet got done I had pasta, shrimp and a bit of spinach, some sun dried tomatoes and cheese left.  

The next morning I packed up that stuff with the extra pasta I'd cooked (intending it to be either for lunch or dinner the next day,) green olives, artichoke hearts, hearts of palm, more sun dried tomatoes, fresh spinach, cheddar cheese, and some marinated ripe olives. 

Lunch time at the office and I had a table full of goodies.  Spaghetti salad it was.  It wasn't a five - on our scale of one to five.  It wasn't even a four.  But, it made a very good lunch and used up something that would've gotten tossed.  Keep in mind you can pretty much put anything in this.  These ingredients just happened to be what I had on hand.

Spaghetti Salad


Ingredients:
1/2 lb cooked whole grain spaghetti
cooked shrimp
1 can artichoke hearts
hearts of palm
pimento stuffed green olives
ripe olives
fresh spinach
cheddar or swiss cheese
sun dried tomatoes packed in olive oil
Italian dressing

Directions:
Chop everything but the spaghetti.  Cut the spaghetti into smaller pieces since twirling the pasta with a salad isnt' the greatest idea :-)  Toss everything with Italian dressing and serve.