This may come as a shock but, before tonight, I had never made macaroni salad. I have made, many a time during my culinary days, macaronish salad, some concoction of leftover plain pasta from yesterday’s lunch line or dinner service, thrown together with other leftovers and a vaguely creamy dressing (eww). But I have never made actual picnic/family bbq/deli-style macaroni salad.

Also: I do not like macaroni salad. It is one of the many dishes I recoil from at a potluck.

However, for the past week I have been craving macaroni salad. Here is the transcription of my internal dialog for the past several days:

Me: I could really go for some macaroni salad, the kind you get in the deli or at every single suburban American potluck picnic ever had.
Myself: Eww.
I: You hate macaroni salad. The mayonnaise alone. My god, the mayonnaise. [I hate mayonnaise. It is disgusting.]
Me: Yeah, it’s gross. But I could really go for some.
Myself: Freak.
I: You hate it because it is disgusting and yet you crave it. This is some kind of quantum sh*t.
Me: Let’s make it and see what happens.
Myself: Eww.
I: Very well. I am willing to indulge you in this quantum experiment. Let us consult the Google machine.

So I did a few searches and here’s where it gets weird: every “classic macaroni salad” recipe I found was…wrong. The recipes called for black olives, jalapenos, 2/3 cup of sugar (unless it is a meringue or some kind of lameass banana bread, *nothing* needs 2/3 of a freakin’ cup of sugar [Myself: Eww.]).

I asked me (not myself, who was horrified by the mere idea of it all) to think about what me found crave-able about macaroni salad.

Me’s reply: the firm but ultimately yielding pasta, the crunch of things that have stood fast against the dressing, the sweet-salty mush-crunch vaguely reminiscent of bread n butter pickles, which me loves (I and myself do as well), the onionness or, if you prefer, the onionocity.

So, I boiled a box of macaroni, rinsed it in cold water, chopped up half a red onion and a lot of baby bell peppers (red and yellow) and the rest of a much-loved jar of Milwaukee brand bread n butter pickles. Then I made a dressing of mostly plain Greek lowfat yogurt with a *little* bit of mayo for its slightly tangy, creamy grossness, Trader Joe’s dill pickle mustard, a bit of liquid from the B+B pickle jar, salt, and pepper. I mixed it all together. It is chilling in the fridge for tomorrow but the taste I took made me very happy. Which is good. Because I have a lot of it. [Myself: Eww.]