I could have stuck a feather in my hat and called it macaroni… The point is, I didn’t have any macaroni, and feathers get stuck in your teeth.

I had offered to take macaroni salad to a baseball barbecue birthday party the next day. So I used some good old Yankee ingenuity when I spotted a couple of cups of leftover brown rice in the fridge.

Brown Rice Salad!  (Baseball Brown Rice Salad, since we were headed to a baseball birthday party.)

It was delicious! Jim would have been proud!

Here’s how I did it:

2 cups cooked cold rice (I had brown basmati, but I think any kind of long-grain rice would work as well)

add

1 cup finely diced celery

½ cup finely diced red onion

½ cup diced red pepper

1 can of black olives, drained and diced

About 8 fresh basil leaves and 8 fresh mint leaves, chopped

Add enough Vidalia Onion Vinegarette to moisten (about ¾ of a cup or a little more)

Salt and pepper to taste

What could be more American than Baseball, Birthdays, and Brown rice salad? It was a home run hit!