Two Lighter Than Usual Pasta Salads: 1. Roasted Mushroom + Farfalle. 2. Roasted Broccoli+ Israeli Couscous.

Translation: No Mayonnaise. Whaaaaaaat?

You can serve the Roasted Mushroom Pasta Salad with or without the Lemon-Parmesan Pangrattato and with or without a little scoop of ricotta cheese.

LATELY, I HAVE THE ATTENTION SPAN OF A fruit fly. I like to think it occasionally serves me well. (It probably does not.) Related: I just read that fruit flies enjoy riding on carousels, which really speaks to me. My mind goes round and round, lands on a theme, then goes around some more, eventually finding its way back to salad.

One minute—after coming across some aggressively square-toed shoes in a women’s magazine—I’ll suddenly become lost in thought about the Mayflower pilgrims. How brave but also slightly insane they were! Crowding together on a merchant ship that was barely the length of a basketball court and only half as wide, then setting out on the unknowable, terrifying sea, hoping to somehow find and then cling to the shore of an equally unknown land. Nuts, right? You really can’t make this stuff up.

You probably can’t see the fruit fly riding this carousel, but it’s there. Getty 📸

I’ve always had a fascination with “Early American” life, and since I write about food, I can’t get enough information about how they ate on the way over. I will dig around for hours looking for new (to me) facts beyond the standard hardtack, salted beef and pork, dried peas, and beer-for-everyone-including-the-kids lore.

For instance, the very first fresh food that the Mayflower Pilgrims found and ate after floating and pitching around the sea without a bath for over 10 weeks—blue mussels—gave them food poisoning. Welcome to America! (I read this in the fascinating book Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, by Nathaniel Philbrick.) And did you know that Pilgrims had knives and spoons but no forks? (Forks were around but not in common use in the Colonies until after the Revolutionary War; this has something to do with why Americans switch hands after cutting their food, but I don’t understand it.)

Pilgrims coming back from their favorite shoe store, Big Buckles. Getty 📷

Next, I’m contemplating what a miracle it was that these early settlers managed to get food on the table (or whatever they ate on; I’m not sure if they actually had dining tables) without the help of a single modern convenience. No fridge. No air fryer. No salad spinner. Just fire and a pot or two.

Of course, they didn’t always do this well, especially at first.

I’m from Virginia, where people are proud of Jamestown as the first successful English settlement. But we don’t brag much about how the settlers’ dangerous lack of agricultural and hunting experience, along with disease and drought, contributed to hunger conditions so dire that the settlers had to eat shoe leather and mice. The winter of 1609, during which a full two-thirds of the colony died, became known as “The Starving Time.” Historians hint that they may have resorted to cannibalism.

I would have been so out of there.