Soup, Salad, Sandwhich, Pasta, Casserole-the creative process

Most anything that can be used for one dish can be used for another. One of my favorite examples of this is Greek Salad turned into Greek Pasta. In Greek Salad you have red onion, tomato, spinach, olives, cucumber, bell peppers, feta, olive oil, balsalmic vinegar, salt, pepper, oregano, basil. You mix the dressing, and toss the salad. As a cold dish this can easily be made into a pasta salad or a sandwich. For the pasta salad I keep all of the ingredients, cook the pasta, cool the pasta in an ice bath, toss it with olive oil then toss it with all of the salad ingredients, including the feta and dressing, garnish and serve. For the sandwich you would just cut things flat instead of 3D, use mayonnaise and mustard, instead of olive oil and balsalmic vinegar, and add the meat of your choice. As a hot dish this is also very versatile, you can; serve it by itself as a vegetable, add pasta for a hot pasta dinner, add meat to make a one pot wonder, or even a hot sandwich if you wanted to grill the veggies and add meat. To turn it into a hot dish, I start by discarding anything that won't cook well, the cucumbers. Then saute the vegetables, except the spinach, and meat if desired, in the olive oil and add it to the precooked pasta, or what ever else I want to add and top it with the spinach, feta, balsamic and herbs. It is also easy to marinate the ingredients, except the spinach, in the dressing and grill them. I have found that men that don't like veggies, will usually eat them grilled. For a casserole, toss it all into a pan, probably with some meat and bake it at 350 for 45 minutes. For soup, do a tomato base then chop up all the ingredients and stir them in. It takes very little creativity to do this, just a knowledge of how foods work. If this example doesn't work for you, think about chili cheese nachos, chili omelette, chili dog, chili cheese fries, chili pizza and just plain old fashion chili. I hope this has inspired you to stir it up a bit, literally.