Seafood Pasta Salad

Unfortunately, this Dutch oven cookbook recipe didn't quite live up to Wayne's expectations. He expected something with lots of shrimp and crab to be super delicious, but it was actually pretty plain tasting. Fortunately, we can doctor up the leftovers to make them taste better.

Here's the original recipe (but we don't recommend it):

Macaroni, Crab and Shrimp Salad

• 3 cups cooked salad pasta
• 1 pound imitation crab meat
• 2 packages small frozen shrimp
• Mayonnaise
• 1 teaspoon garlic salt
• 1 teaspoon onion salt
• 1 teaspoon black pepper

Combine everything and serve with hot rolls or French bread.

Now for our notes:

2 cups of uncooked pasta equaled about 4 1/2 cups cooked pasta. I wanted to use ditalini, but could not find any at our grocery store so we used small shells instead. We started with three cups, but the salad was way too salty, so we added the remaining 1 1/2 cups. Cut the salt in half!

Packages of shrimp at our store were 12 ounces; we bought two but only added one to this salad. "X-Small" shrimp was the smallest size and those were about 1" long.

We started with about 3/4 cup mayonnaise, then added a couple more tablespoons when we added the additional pasta.

We're considering adding some vegetables - peas, broccoli, celery, onions, red pepper, cherry tomatoes, black olives - and some additional seasonings - dry mustard or celery seed - and maybe even some sour cream.

Our original batch tasted better the second day when we served the salad with hot rolls; I guess the flavors needed time to meld. However, for our third meal we did add diced red onion, green peas, hard-boiled egg pieces, and a bit of sour cream. We liked this variation much better.

The next night we added red onion, black olives and grated Cheddar cheese to the original batch, along with a bit of Ranch dressing. It was a nice variation as well, but I preferred the previous one (without cheese).