Absolutely not

This weekend, the Smelmooo and I are hosting his family to celebrate my mother-in-law's birthday (introducing Tucker to his...cousins? is a secondary goal for the gathering). Smelmooo will grill up some dinner (which of course means that it will rain), so I've been thinking about appropriate side dishes. And, now that I'm a grown-up, I realize that I can't just think about the side dishes that I like, because that would be an incredibly bland, boring meal.

So I was thinking that MIL (for whom I still have no name; I think that the birthday card I give her will have to read "Dear Hey, You!," or something) usually has some sort of pasta side dish, like her famous tuna-macaroni-casserole, so maybe I'd kick off the summer barbecue season with a pasta salad of some sort. My friend Sallie makes an outstanding pasta salad that's really light on condiments (we share weird food habits and strong aversions to condiments, which is part of why we get along and can travel well together) but full of flavor, but unfortunately she's on her honeymoon through the first week of June, so no luck there.

So I turned to my trusty "How to Cook Everything" cookbook by Mark Bittman, which is an excellent -- if underused in my kitchen -- resource. I wasn't sure if pasta salad would be in the pasta section or the salad section, so I found it in the index under "Pasta Salad -- note on" which seemed a little odd, but I turned to the appropriate page to discover that Mark Bittman firmly believes that there is no reason for pasta salad. I'm paraphrasing, but he basically says that although leftover pasta is a reality we all encounter from time to time, and if there's truly nothing else to do with said leftover pasta it's okay to add it to an existing salad, under no circumstances should one set out expressly to make pasta salad.

I don't have a whole lot of experience with cookbooks, but I was truly surprised to see such a bold statement. I've never really been one for pasta salad, but I'd never heard of anyone having an explicit objection to it in theory. What power Mark Bittman wields, making a blanket anti-pasta-salad policy, making those of us who considered serving our guests pasta salad hang our heads in shame, trying to recover our dignity, stammering, "No, no...what I really meant was an Italian salad, not a pasta salad! Pasta salad! Pfft!"

If my mom wrote a cookbook, she'd make a similar edict about peas in penne vodka dishes (actually, the Smelmooo would do the same), although I quite enjoy the splash of color and unusual texture they add. If I wrote a cookbook...well, no one would buy it, because it would be called "The Lazy Girl's Guide to Preparing Bland Food" and have at most 10 recipes in it. But if I did write a cookbook, I hope that I'd be able to write as confidently, disparagingly and authoritatively about mustard as Bittman did about pasta salad. Forget the great American novel! I think this is my new publishing goal.