So what’s this business about frog eyes? Well, it gets that name because the little spheres of round pasta (more on that in a minute) look like tiny frog eyes in the bowl. Cute, right? And a little weird too.
Are you now thinking, there’s pasta in a dessert salad? Because I know I was. It’s true. This salad incorporates acini de pepe pasta and a handful of other ingredients that you might recognize from ambrosia. So you get little balls of chewy pasta, mandarin oranges, pineapple, marshmallows, and coconut, all folded into a sweet pineapple custard. (And of course there’s Cool Whip. Would this even be a retro salad without Cool Whip?)
This tastes almost exactly like the ambrosia salad my mom has always made (which my sister and I always affectionately called marshmallow salad) but has the little added bonus of a bit of pasta chew. It doesn’t overtake the dish, it barely even registers as pasta… so while those “frog eyes” might seem odd at first, they totally work.
