Pasta Salad Bar

My kids are picky. One weird thing about some picky kids is that they might like all the parts of a meal, but then when you put it together, they won't eat it. For example, my kids just started eating tacos as tacos. Even though they like hamburger, cheese, salsa, and olives, (and corn chips of course) when I would combine these items into a taco, they would refuse to eat it. It made me super crazy. And then I gave up (yes, I'm weak). I started putting the different taco items in bowls on the table and they would eat their tacos ingredient by ingredient. Le sigh. But now they eat them normally, so yay.

A few weeks ago when I was craving pasta salad, I was bummed because I was like "No one except Kip will eat it." And then I realized: My kids like pasta, my kids like olives, some of them like pepperoni, some of them like cheese, some of them like broccoli. And I realized that a pasta bar could meet my grown up craving and their picky kid needs (or wants as it were).

The truth is if you're a parent of picky kids and you don't necessarily want the battle of the century at all your meals, it's often a good idea to break some meals down into their individual parts, especially when you introduce new foods.

Try it. It's a party.

For our pasta salad, I combined the salad with the dressing (and actually even the broccoli because I wanted mine dressing soaked), but left the other ingredients separate.

I'd love to give you a killer dressing recipe, but mine was only so so. The toppings we used were broccoli, cheddar cheese, olives, pepperoni, and sausage. I desperately wanted artichokes as well, but we were out (the horror). They were a fantastic combination of toppings that made up for the lame-ish dressing.