By request: Anniversary Pasta Salad

Let's take a break from the madness. I need one, you do too? Okay, how about cooking something summery? Put those crises in a pillowcase, thrash them about a bit, and then tie the top. Yeah, they'll escape soon enough, but at least right now they're chewing on each other trying to get out.

Okay, off to the kitchen. I think both cooking and baking can be therapeutic for different reasons. Baking: reassuring and orderly. Cooking: a whack on the side of the head, a jolt that might get me thinking differently about the problem(s) and possibly come up with other ideas.

This is a salad I threw together for our 25th anniversary party. I consider cooking an art and baking a science. In other words, baking is almost uniformly a science experiment, i.e. combine the exact ingredients in the exact measure in the exact conditions (humidity, heat, etc.) and you should have a baked good emerge from your efforts. Baking is very gratifying because it doesn't fall along the realm of unpredictability, by and large. Do these exact things, and you should end up with the baked good of your dreams.

On the other hand, I consider cooking an art. Throw in a little of this and a little of that, and see what you come up with. Keep track of what you did, or you'll never be able to replicate it again. Or intentionally DON'T keep track, and enjoy a one time adventure.

Here's the ingredients. Need I say that they are open to experimentation, and you'll have to come up with the amounts yourself? It wouldn't be an art otherwise, would it?

Here are my suggestions:

Pretty pasta. I used Neptune's Dream pasta (photo and vendor shown), but of course that's all up to you. I like the multicolored aspect, but you could always go monochromatic.
Pesto dressing. I just used Kraft.
Roasted red peppers
Chopped green pepper
Black olives
Artichoke hearts
Basil (yeah, I added some more) and extra virgin olive oil
Chopped garlic cloves
Crumbled feta cheese
Chopped vidalia onions
Salt, pepper, whatever other seasonings suit you.

Okay, run with it, and make something exclusively your own. Not necessarily a substitute for therapy, but a heck of an adjunct. :-)