barbecue & noodle salad.

Tonight our friends had us over for a lovely mid-week barbecue. On one of my favorite food blogs, the hilarious Sunday Williams wrote about not understanding the big deal about bbq. Let me lay it out for you, homegirl:



Cheers. Nothing compares to kicking back in someone's backyard at 6 o'clock on a weekday, sitting in one of those fugly fold-up camping chairs with the cup holders with a boozy cool beverage in one hand and a sloppy plate of something in the other. (Can you tell I was picking at roasted beets?) I mean, in this case- we really didn't even need to fire up the grill. Jason and I were coming off a week of some heavy meat dishes and neither of us were in the mood for something meaty, and one of our buddies is vegan, so the only thing we actually grilled was slabs of fresh-picked zucchini and some heads of garlic.



It's not about the food, although everyone knows that almost anything tastes better licked by flames and smoke, carcinogens be damned. It's about relaxing and talking smack with people you like and enjoying beautiful summer weather.

Also, look at this rad plate:



Anyway, as usual, I hustled around my kitchen trying to think of something nice to bring, and of course, I fell back on a delicious noodle salad. It just seems so RIGHT when you're eating a plate of something grilled to have a cold pile of noodles on your plate. I managed to cobble together this salad from a bunch of stuff I had on hand, and it came out awesome!



It's just cold cooked noodles (like 1/2 a bag), chopped tomato, cucumber, parsley, and roasted red pepper (actually, it was an orange pepper). I added a can of kidney beans, and then I made a dressing with a large dollop of tahini, thinned with lemon juice, a splash of apple cider vinegar & some olive oil. There are a lot of tahini dressing recipes online (I did a quick google search before I made it to give myself an idea of what I wanted to do) and they all thin the tahini with water, but I decided to use olive oil because I wanted the noodles to stay coated with the sauce, and I figured if I used water, it'd all soak in and they'd end up gummy and dry. Finished it off with a bunch of salt & pepper and it was awesome, mega stoked.