This is not a recipe. It's more like an algorithm. It's a "how to spend a couple hours making a nice enormous salad that you can eat non-stop for three to five days while cleaning out all the old vegetables in your fridge" algorithm. I love this stuff, although it definitely ain't haut cuisine.
Virtually none of the specific vegetable ingredients are required. Use what you have. But use lots, and pick the veggies you actually like. The idea here is to have about three or four or five parts cut vegetables to one part cooked pasta -- and I always cook the entire box (13.5 ounces) of pasta. You need a huge mixing bowl to make this, and (most likely) at least two different pots to store it in your fridge.
Step 1: Choose a pasta. 100% whole wheat, of course. Long pastas (spaghetti, angel hair, linguini) work, and if you julienne all the vegetables, you get something like cold Japanese soba noodles. (In fact, that was my original inspiration for this dish.) But I find I prefer smaller pasta shapes -- penne, fusili, or elbow. Once you've chosen your pasta, visualize what a piece of that pasta will look like when it's cooked. That's (roughly speaking) the size and shape you want to chop all your vegetables, which is why you need to decide now which pasta you're going to use, even though you've got an hour's worth (or more) of chopping to do before it's time to actually cook the pasta.
Step 2: Assemble, wash, and prepare your vegetables for chopping. Go through your garden and your fridge, figuring out what you've got that needs to get eaten in the next few days. Pull all those out, and then enough other vegetables to mostly fill whatever huge mixing bowl you're using today. However, I advise against choosing any leafy vegetables, because they don't last (chopped in your fridge) as long as it may take you to eat all this salad. (Also, confession time, I don't really like leafy green vegetables -- this salad arose from my efforts to eat plenty of vegetables without eating too many of the greens I dislike.) You could probably get away with including kale, though I would treat it like the cabbage (see below).
Although this salad is different every time I make it, the vegetables I used today included:
1 large yellow onion
1 medium red onion
1/2 of a small head of purple cabbage
1/2 of a small head of green cabbage
5 large carrots
1 yellow bell pepper (more would be good, or red/green ones. All I had today was one yellow one.)
2 large cucumbers, peeled and seeded (reserve the seeds). Normally I don't peel cukes but these were covered in that nasty supermarket wax. Normally I don't seed cukes, but in this case the seeds go in the dressing.
1 small-to-medium zucchini, peeled.
1-2 large tomatoes
6-8 green onions (tops and white part)
8-10 medium radishes
Half a head of celery, or the whole head if it's getting yucky and you have to trim all the rotten bits off first and throw out half the outer stalks
2 jalepeno peppers, diced fine (optional)
You can use any salad veggie you like -- if it's edible raw and keeps for a few days chopped up in a vinegar-based dressing, you can put it in this salad.
Step 3: Chop and prep your cabbage and onions. I like to shred the cabbage, but chopping works fine. Onions of course need to be chopped. Remember that when chopping, we are going for vegetable piece sizes that loosely match the size of whatever pasta you will be cooking. This doesn't matter very much, it just makes the salad prettier and easier to eat.
The reason we are doing the cabbage and onions separately from the other veg is that we are going to do a light "fast pickle" of these veggies, to soften the tough cabbage and to take the worst of the fire out of the raw onions. To accomplish this, get a bowl big enough to hold the chopped/shredded cabbage and the chopped onions. Then dump a lot of vinegar over the veggies. You could get away with covering them in vinegar, but it's a waste of vinegar; if you just pour in enough to fill to about half the depth of the veggies in your bowl, you can accomplish the same thing by stirring every twenty minutes or so. You'll recover this vinegar later to use when we are making the dressing. The best-tasting vinegar for this in my opinion is rice vinegar, but any cheap vinegar will do. I usually use apple cider vinegar because it's dirt cheap and has a good flavor, but I've used cheap Chinese cane vinegar and even plain white distilled vinegar. It doesn't matter. I wouldn't use an expensive fancy vinegar for this step, because you're using rather a lot.
This salad, like many, tastes better with a bit of salt in it. If you're avoiding salt, you don't need to add any, but if you are going to add any, this is the place to do it. The reason: the fast-pickle process works better if you add some salt to your vinegar. A splash of soy sauce will do, or a teaspoon of salt, or just a dash/pinch if you're being careful. Whatever you are comfortable with.
I also like to add some red pepper at this point -- a big spoon of samba olek pepper paste, or a teaspoon of powered chilis, or some sriracha if that's what you use (I don't, because it has sugar, but the amount in this dish wouldn't matter.) Even a few hefty glugs of Tobasco would help.
You can also add other herbs at this stage, if it pleases you -- anything savory that you don't mind crunching in a salad. I like a couple of teaspoons of fennel seeds, but dill or even caraway would also work if you enjoy those flavors.
So stir up your cabbage/onions and vinegar (and salt if any, and hot pepper if any, and herb seeds if any) and set it aside.
Step 4: Chop or prep the rest of your vegetables. Carrots I tend to shred -- the rest I chop up. Any size below bite-sized will do, but if I'm using fusili, I go for a sort of a "fat short julienne" that's maybe 6mmx6mmx30mm. If I'm using elbow noodles, it's more of a course rectangular dice -- maybe 6mmx6mmx15mm. As you chop, keep dumping your chopped vegetables into your biggest mixing bowl. Stop when you've used all your veggies or you realize that it will be full once you stir in a full box of cooked pasta.
Step 5: Consider other bulk ingredients. This is not a bean salad (except for the dressing) but I'll often throw in half a can of chickpeas or a bag of thawed but uncooked green peas. If you've got a partial can of any cooked whole beans in your fridge, you could throw those in. Thawed frozen corn would also probably be good here. Black beans are excellent. I've considered, but not yet tried, diced cooked potatoes.
Step 6: Consider other flavoring ingredients. The vinegar-based dressing is pretty tangy, and there's nothing sweet in this salad (although you could experiment with firm fruits that don't darken quickly when cut) to balance that. I like to add half a cup of stewed raisins at this step, to provide little rare and surprising sweet flavor nuggets in select mouthfulls. To "make" them, I take half a cup of raisins, put them in a microwave-safe bowl, and add just enough fruit juice (orange or apple are what I have used) to cover. Nuke in the micro until the liquid is about boiling, then set aside to cool and soak. Soak for as much time as you got, then add this ingredient near the last.
Another flavorant I like to add is capers, just a tablespoon or two (half the tiny jar, max). If you don't know about capers, they are some sort of intensely-flavored little pickled seed pods sold next to the pickles in most stores. They tend to be salty and sour and contain essentially no calories, so I like them for putting little bursts of salt and vinegar into food. But you'll want to avoid if you are watching your sodium.
Step 6: Make your dressing. The dressing concept here is vinegar and citrus juice and onion for flavor, white beans and cucumber guts for texture, season to taste. This dressing is never the same twice when I make it, because I'm always experimenting with added spices. Here's how I made it today:
A) I poured the excess salty vinegar from my "fast pickle" bowl into a medium mixing bowl with high sides.
B) I poured the excess sweet liquid from my stewed raisins into my bowl.
C) I diced a sweet yellow onion as fine as possible and added it to the bowl.
D) I opened a can of great northern beans and a can of white navy beans (any canned beans would do, but I like white ones for better dressing color) and dumped them in the bowl.
E) I added the juice of two limes.
F) I threw in the seedy parts of the cucumbers, that I reserved earlier when I seeded them.
G) I added a bit of cumin, a bit of powdered hot chilis, a bit of black pepper, and a bit of garlic powder. All this is to taste and by preference, and is purely optional anyway.
H) I used my immersion blender (you could use a regular blender or food processor) to puree as finely as possible.
I) Taste and adjust flavors -- more salt or soy sauce if you want/need, but most importantly, watch the sweet/sour balance. If it's too sour, consider a teaspoon of the sweetener of your choice, or a bit of canned corn, which purees up very sweetly. If it's too sweet, consider more vinegar or citrus juice. Your goal is a thick, goopy rich-tasting liquid that looks and feels like (usually a bit runny) salad dressing -- the beans give it body. Color is usually white (if you were very pure with white beans and cuke innards only and minimized your spices and didn't have red onions in your fast pickle) to various shades of dirty gray or pink. You want a lot of this stuff in your bowl -- that's why we used two cans of beans -- because you've got a ton of veggies to dress and because your pasta will soak up an enormous amount of liquid once you toss this baby together.
Step 7: Cook the pasta, per the instructions on the box. (You can usually start doing this at about the same time you start making the dressing.) But pull the pasta from the heat when it's still al dente -- or at least try not to overcook and waterlog the noodles. You want them able to soak up some dressing. As soon as you strain them, put them back in your pot and fill the pot with cold water. Wash the noodles with your hands in the cold water, spend a few minutes at it. Your goal is to wash off the cooked slime that coats the noodles, so they can better soak up dressing. Err on the side of "more washing" rather than less, if you have the patience. It's no big deal. Drain again, and put back in the cooking pot.
Step 8: Dress the pasta. By this I mean, take your bowl of dressing and dump it into your pasta cooking pot, then stir well until all the noodles are essentially marinating in your dressing. It's fine to leave them to soak for five or ten minutes at this point, though you don't have to.
Step 9: Dump pasta and dressing into your big bowl of chopped veggies. If you haven't already done so, dump your lightly-pickled cabbage and onions in now, too. Stir well. Enjoy!
Step 10: Storage. You've got a ton of salad in a bowl that's probably too big to fit easily in your fridge. What I do is let it sit on the counter while I eat my first plate of the stuff, so the flavors can continue to blend together. Then I stuff my pasta pot (which does fit into my fridge) as full as it will go, cover, and refrigerate. The rest I put in the smallest mixing bowl that will hold it, cover that, and put it in the fridge beside the pasta pot. You'll basically need to use whatever airtight containers you got. I have eaten this stuff out to about day 5, when the veggies are usually getting a bit limp. But usually, it's gone in three days or less, and remains crisp and tasty for that time. The whole wheat noodles absorb enormous amounts of liquid and dampen/soften all the strong flavors, so it just keeps getting better as it stores.
