That "salad" is bad - especially if you don't eat cheese! It has been common on AA for quite some months and it keeps coming back to haunt me - I had it coming back from LAX to LHR a few days ago. Not only is it cheese-covered but if you invert it and try to eat from the bottom up, you discover the pasta is soft and almost tasteless. Some sharp pesto sauce would greatly improve it.
The AA main courses are usually OK (for example, my panko-crusted prawns with steamed vegetables was pretty good) but these slight variations on boring orzo pasta with bad cheese need to go. Who in AA's operations department has position in orzo pasta futures ?
I have no idea why the crew would take your menu; no AA crew has ever taken it from me, I have brought more than 95% of them home with me after travel.
The crew experience to/from CLT is very US Southern; the crews are clearly local to CLT and they're pretty talkative if you want to have a chat. I think they generally do a pretty good service, my experience hasn't been the disorganised service that you had.