Nothing says summer more than bright colors, fresh veggies, and cool, refreshing meals! Today's recipe fits all the categories with a sure to be favorite Summer Pasta Salad. Simple and quick to make, this side dish pairs with almost any meal and offers up a great chance to use up leftover vegetables and pantry staples! It tastes even better when you fill it with your own fresh garden veggies so sit back and relax while we quickly cover this one...Let's get cooking!
The first step in creating this simple Summer Pasta Salad is boiling the pasta itself. Honestly, any pasta you have in the cupboard will probably do, but a TriColor Garden Rotini is my go-to for this particular recipe. Heat the water to boiling, dump the pasta, and cook it to Al Dente....fairly straight forward, eh? You don't want overcooked pasta because it will be too mushy and not hold up, but you also need it cooked enough that you aren't eating raw pasta since this is the only time it will see any heat. It should only take about 9-11 minutes so start tasting a piece after 9 minutes and judge from there. Once it is al dente and done to your liking, immediately rinse and cool the pasta under cold running water in a colander. This will stop the cooking process and start chilling the pasta for the next steps. Go ahead and get everything well drained and transfer it to a large mixing bowl. This can be covered and put in the fridge while we prep the rest of the ingredients.
If you have decent knife skills, all the veggie prep can likely be accomplished while the pasta cooks, but for the sake of easiness, feel free to do all your dicing and slicing afterwards. Cut your English cucumber in half lengthwise and slice into thin half moons. You could use a regular cucumber, but all those seeds and mushy middle sections suck so take my advice and use an English cuke!
Next, pull out a bag or pre-shredded carrots and toss a handful, about a cup, into a bowl and pretend like you did all the work yourself! Or be extra and peel a carrot and shred away...your choice and I'm not judging, but we will all see those knuckles you likely shredded on the grater, just sayin'!
Hopefully by this point you get the idea so I'm just going to show off my actual knife skills for the remaining veggies. You don't have to dirty up a bunch of dishes like I did for the pics so go ahead and just toss everything into one bowl as you go. The key factor is that everything is cut and sliced/diced to essentially the same size, minus the onion. You will want to make it much finer so people don't start bitching about giant ass pieces of onion burning their mouths, trust me. Any bell pepper will work, so use what you have or whatever is on sale and available. Same goes for the cherry tomatoes. You can dice regular tomatoes or use snazzy multi-colored ones...up to you. Queue up the elevator music and chop chop chop away!
Alright, hopefully everyone still has all their fingers and some nicely prepared vegetables at this point. Pull that large mixing bowl full of pasta from the fridge and combine all the veggies with it. Go ahead and give everything a quick toss to start mixing evenly. Now it is time for the all important dressing! There are a few options commercially available that work really well for this pasta salad. Olive Garden Italian Dressing is pretty good, but I went with this random Vidalia Onion Dressing I found at Costco, I believe.
I used about half a bottle for the recipe card amounts, but feel free to use more or less to your own personal liking. Keep in mind some water will start to come out from the veggies thinning the dressing out a bit as well so don't overdo it from the beginning. Start with half a bottle and let it setup several hours then add more if you feel the need. Make sure everything is evenly coated and refrigerate several hours, or overnight is best!
Simple, delicious, and quick, eh? Serve this Summer Pasta Salad cold as a side dish to whatever meat you threw on the grill. You can be a total meat glutton and still claim that you ate your veggies with a serving of this on the side! It gets better the longer it sits in the fridge so make it at least a day in advance and plan on finishing it off 2-3 days later. You can substitute various other veggies or make it as is, but give it a try and let me know what you and your family thought. What dressing did you use and why should I try it myself next time? Hit me up on Instagram @grubbongrub and tag your pics with #SummerPastaSalad. Until next time, stay classy and make delicious food.....just keep cooking!
SUMMER PASTA SALAD
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