I was going to post a question: Does This Sound Tasty? and then list some of the ingredients I'm considering for a pasta salad, but then I thought "Hey! I'll bet folks have pasta salad recipes to share."
I have to bring something for a potluck and thought I'd do a pasta salad with some of the stuff I have in the house.
I have some tiny pasta shapes like mini gemelli and mini rotini. Also have a couple boxes of orzo. In the fridge I have some English cucumbers (I'd like to use some because they don't last long). My neighbor has a bunch of fresh dill and mint in her garden that I'm welcome to take. I have some blue cheese. I have some garlic. Fresh chives in my own garden. I soaked some cannellini beans overnight and I'm cooking them right now. I have a small variety of Italian style salad dressings.
I don't propose to use all these ingredients, but want a nice combination of some of them.
I'll have to get started pretty soon, so I may be winging it. Wish me luck.
With cucumber, dill, and garlic you could make a turkish-style yoghurt sauce. You'd need to get some yoghurt though.
Mint works too - try some of the herb (either dill or mint) together with grated cucumber, minced garlic and mix it with yoghurt to see if you like it. I generally use it as a dip, but it may work with pasta as well.
Also have lots of cans of tuna, some cans of chunk chicken and a couple cans of salmon in the cabinet, but I don't know how any of that might work with the other available ingredients (other than the dill).
I didn't feel like going out to the store for anything more so I did a mix of the gemelli (which turned out not to be "mini" and thus, not as cute) and rotini. Peeled and chopped a cucumber, a few cloves of pressed garlic, some Italian seasonings, cracked pepper, some chopped red onion. For dressing I used something called a "robusto" Italian, but that was really too sweet to my taste so I added a dash of Annie's shitake mushroom & sesame dressing, which took the sweetness down a notch.
I had to leave the beans out because they did not cook right, at all.
I'll let the flavors mesh in the fridge for a few hours and then try adding some crumbled blue cheese and see how that is.
Sure. You can always add more herbs. I tend to avoid raw onions, even red ones, in pasta salad. They can overwhelm. The exception is green onions which are completely awesome in any raw application.
The buttermilk would have been a key ingredient in a blue cheese and chive dressing that makes, imho, the single greatest pasta salad dressing of all time. (It also makes the greatest barley salad dressing of all time, the greatest beet salad dressing of all time, and one of the top three best Romaine salad dressings of all time.)
Well, the stuff is pretty potent with the blue cheese added. It's not awful, but I can see how some people may not like it. I'll probably stop & pick up some cookies or something on the way over.
OK, so the two pastas, blue cheese, the Robusto Italian dressing, a little bit of shitake & sesame dressing, cucumbers.
I removed most of the onions, the good thing about red onions is that you can see them.
I'd added too much blue cheese and that's all I could taste, so I cooked up some more pasta and sliced up another half a cuke.
It was still missing something, so I went with something weird. I have this bag of little packets of something called powdered ginger drink. I dissolved a packet in a tiny bit of water and mixed it in and that sent it over the edge into yumdom. It was a hit, they ate almost all of it.
Not really a salad, but one of my favorite pasta dishes of recent is Pasta tossed with Parmesan, Broccoli, and Garlic.
I usually use Angel Hair, but I'm sure any noodle will do.
You will need:
Cooked pasta - About 4 cups
Broccoli Crowns blanched and Finely chopped
Parmesan Reggiano - 1/2 to 1 cup grated
Minced Garlic - 1 to 2 cloves
Salt & Pepper to taste
Lemon Zest - 1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons
Olive Oil - About 1/4 cup
Okay, so the AC is out and I wanted something chilled and nice to nom. Cupboard is a bit bare but this is what I whipped up.
Farfalle pasta
One can of beets sliced into slivers
Minced garlic
Balsamic vinegar
Rosemary
Sweet basil
Black pepper
Evoo drizzle
I refrigerated that and plan on topping with some shredded provolone cheese before serving. I wish I had some feta. Also wish I had some green onion or something to give it some crunch. Tasted p. good, I hope it turns out well.
I'm afraid I have no recipe for my pasta salad. It kind of goes like this.
chop chop chop, shake shake shake, stir stir stir, taste taste taste
chop chop chop, shake shake shake, stir stir stir, taste taste taste
chop chop chop, shake shake shake, stir stir stir, taste taste taste
(Insert magic, alchemy or something else here)
Past salad
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Oh I should update my experiment above was... Mixed.
I liked the flavor of the rosemary, but the texture was off. Had the flavor been infused in the oil maybe it wpuld have been better. As it was the mouth feel was off. Also was missing a huge something. No idea what.
Pasta Salad
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