Easy Pasta Salad

This is a great recipe for a hot summer night and you can mix and match ingredients to your families tastes. This was a hit with the whole family tonight.

Ingredients:
1 Pkg. Angel Hair Pasta
1 bottle of Zesty Italian dressing (Kraft)
meat cut into bite sized pieces (we did grilled chicken pre cooked and thawed from costco, and pepperoni)
veggies (green/red peppers, tomatoes, olives, zucchini, summer squash)
cheese if you want (we did cheddar, asiago and fresh parm tonight)

Toss all together with dressing (not the whole bottle- just enough to moisten) and serve cold.

Hawaiian Haystacks

This quick and easy dinner is a family favorite. My kids love it because they can choose what to put on theirs- I love it because it's fast and everyone likes it (and ends up eating more veggies then they realize).

The important thing here is options. You don't HAVE to have all of these ingredients- and when you put them on the table it's best to let people build their own.

Base:
Rice (I prefer brown- but white works well)
'crunchy noodles' (chow mein noodles)

Create your haystack with any/all of the following:
cheese
pineapple
ham
cut up chicken
polish keilbsa
celery
tomatoes
peppers (I like red ones on mine)
olives
green onions
coconut
almonds

Top with Sweet and Sour sauce

Sweet and Sour Sauce

This is a recipe that I've been using since I was about 9. We learned how to make Hawaiian Haystacks at a church activity and used this sauce. I also use it to top sweet and sour meatballs.

Sweet and Sour sauce:
mix:
1 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp garlic
1/2 tsp ginger (I usually add more of each ginger and garlic though)
2 Tbls. cornstarch
then add:
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar (white works though)
1/3 cup pineapple juice
1/3 cup water (you can add more water and less juice or more juice less water to adjust sweetness)
2 tsp soy sauce

microwave for 4-5 minutes until thickened