Check out this beautiful multicolor pasta from Italy. It’s shaped like “Stelle Alpine” flowers, and each color is a different flavor: tomato, beet, spinach, carrot, and squid. I wanted to use them in a way that would show them off, and I thought a vinaigrette pasta salad might be the way to do it. This Pasta Salad with Fresh Cod is delicious, light, and just the right amount of “different.” The cod blends in to such an extent, that you don’t come away from it thinking “seafood” … it just gives it both umami and freshness.

Ingredients for 6 generous main-course portions

1 Yukon gold potato
Lemon zest (from one lemon)
½ Tbs butter
1 bunch of asparagus, trimmed
8 oz. multicolor starburst pasta
1 cup celery (2-4 ribs), diced
1 cup diced red bell pepper (from one medium pepper)
¼ cup finely minced parsley (or to taste)
⅔ cup pitted black olives, halved
1 cup frozen sweet corn kernels, thawed
1 cup frozen peas, thawed
1 Tbs basil chiffonade
1 tsp Dijon mustard
2 Tbs + 1½ tsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
6 Tbs extra-virgin olive oil
Coarse salt and freshly ground pepper
1 can (15 oz.) Cannellini beans, strained and rinsed
1½ lbs. steamed or baked cod (see notes)
Iceberg lettuce

How To Do It

1. Fully cook the potato according to your microwave’s instructions. Dice it, and toss it with butter and a few generous pinches of zest, to taste. Set aside to cool. Meanwhile, slice the asparagus tips off of their stalks and set them aside. Reserve the stalks for another use.
2. Boil the pasta until fully tender (further than al dente – fully cooked). Remove it from the water with a spider, and rinse it thoroughly with cold water. Then, add the asparagus tips to the pasta-cooking water, and place the pot back on the stove until the tips are done, about 5 minutes. Strain. Rinse in very cold water to halt the cooking process.
3. Place the celery, pepper, parsley, olives, corn, peas, and basil in a large mixing bowl.
4. Place the mustard, remaining zest, lemon juice, and olive oil in a small container. Season with salt and pepper. Seal it tightly and shake the hell out of it. Check the seasoning. Pour half of it over the mixture in the mixing bowl and toss thoroughly. Add the potatoes, asparagus and beans and toss again. Add the pasta. Break the fish into its natural sections with your fingers as you add it to the mixing bowl as well. Pour the remaining dressing over all, and gently toss.
5. Serve at room temperature, over iceberg lettuce leaves. Leftover salad should be refrigerated; allow leftover servings several minutes to come toward room temperature before serving. Leftovers are nearly indistinguishable from fresh, so feel free to make ahead.

Notes

1. I have a recipe for baking cod in foil. It’s perfect for this. If you follow it, omit the spinach; when the fish is cooked, strain off the liquid and place the fish on paper towels: you’re good to go. (You can omit more than the spinach if you want to. You could get by with simply oiling the foil and seasoning the fish with a moderate dusting of salt and pepper.) You could do double duty: make the cod-in-foil recipe for dinner one night, excluding the spinach from two of the servings. Let those two spinach-less servings cool, and refrigerate them. Use them for this pasta salad recipe the next night.
2. Remove the seeds and ribs from the pepper before dicing it.
3. Although the ingredient list calls for the corn and peas to be thawed, if you toss them into the mix while they’re still frozen, they’ll be thawed by the time you’re done.
4. I recommend you cook the reserved asparagus stalks, chill them, and use them in a green salad.
5. This recipe produces just the right amount of vinaigrette to dress the salad perfectly. If you really love your salad swimming in dressing, though, you might want to make extra vinaigrette. Or, if you’re planning to eat it leftover, the pasta soaks up some of the dressing over time, and you may find you want a little extra hit.
6. Capers might be a nice addition.

Is cold cod weird? No, or maybe yes and no. Yes in the sense that using cold cod – not salt cod, but fresh, cooked, cooled cod – in a salad is, according to my admittedly pedestrian research abilities, uncommon. I did come across the idea in an ancient copy of James Beard’s “American Cookery.” Perhaps it was once more ordinary, but has long fallen out of fashion? Cold cod in a hearty salad is definitely not weird in the sense that it’s perfectly delicious. Cod is fantastic cold, and it’s mild enough to make friends with all sorts of other ingredients. It’s absolutely wonderful in this context. Although tuna and salmon are the only fish that many people seem to find to be pasta-worthy, cod’s chunky yet delicate texture is perfect with large pasta shapes.

Everybody except me has a favorite pasta recipe, so to create this one, I turned to some of my favorite websites for inspiration: CD Kitchen, Kitchen Riffs, Neil’s Healthy Meals, Sippity Sup, and Spiced. Starting with the idea that I wanted to build a pasta salad around fish, I looked up pasta salads on each of those sites, and little snippets of each of those recipes came together to make this one.

Pasta Salad with Fresh Cod

Credit for images on this page: Make It Like a Man! This content was not solicited by anyone, nor was it written in exchange for anything. Thank you, Textalyzer.

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