Experiment with Frog Eye Salad - Unsuccessful

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a story about making baked beans while Mom was traveling. This year, I decided to make frog eye salad in addition to the baked beans. 

I do not have a recipe for this salad. I have always used the recipe from the box of Acini de Pepe pasta. However, neither our local Kroger nor Walmart grocery had this pasta in stock. So I used a recipe I found on allrecipes.com.

After some internet searching, I learned I could substitute couscous pasta for the acini de pepe. This presented two issues for me. First, all the recipes I found called for 16 oz. of dry pasta. The smallest box of couscous I found was 24 oz. so, we 1.5 times the recipe. Second, the couscous I bought was smaller in diameter than the acini de pepe pasta I usually use.

Tate and I made the salad. The large pot I would normally use to cook the pasta was filled with baked beans. So, we used the largest saucepan. We made it work but the pan was not really big enough!

As I poured the dry pasta into the boiling water, the volume displacement indicated I needed to remove some water from the pan. Then as the pasta cooked, it absorbed all the water. To compensate, I added more water 1/2 cup at a time. Just enough to bring the water level to the brim of the pan. Then I carefully stirred the cooking pasta to expand into the middle of the pan. This made a mounding heap above the pan. Then I could add more water.

The diameter of the couscous was smaller than the holes in our colander. Thus, I could not rinse the pasta after it cooked. When we dumped the pasta out of the pan, some in the bottom of the pan was clumped together in the consistency of grits. However most of the large clumps separated as we stirred in the pineapple, mandarin oranges, and sauce.  

We had to use the largest popcorn bowl we had because 1.5 times the recipe made A LOT of frog eye salad!

our finished frog eye salad

We refrigerated the salad overnight and tasted it the next day. Ashton, Tate, and I all ate what we originally dished on our plates; however, none of us were overly enthused about eating more of the salad. The clumpiness of the couscous made the wrong texture taste. In addition, the pasta had that "starchy water" taste left because we could not rinse the pasta. 

We decided to throw away the rest of the salad.