So do you want Italian pasta salad? That too at your own place? Is it true? This is great. Because if you always go to visit a restaurant and spend a lot of money on food then you probably can have those only one or two times in a month or sometimes even less because you won’t visit restaurants so frequently and secondly you always not try same salad there. Then what? okay, you started to believe to make your dish at home so that you can try that so frequently.
I have also started to make salads and other dishes at home so that I can try those so often. Though I make dishes only those foods that are not cooked at our home regularly. Secondly, I always try to make delicious vegetarian dishes so that I can reduce my non-vegetarian food intake. I was a great street food lovers a few years back.
I travelled a lot across the country and tried many local foods in every corner of India where I visited. Initially, I was like other tourists who eat same food what they use to eat at home. So Bengali people search Bengali food restaurants whenever they are outside Bengal, Marwari people search Rajasthani food restaurants whenever they visit another city outside Rajasthan, Tamil search for south Indian food store when they come to North India. But I find this is boring, rather illogical because you are spending a lot for visiting another place then why will you lose the chance to try their local foods cooked in a traditional way.
Okay, now coming to Italian pasta salad. I normally prefer to add any available seasonal vegetable to this salad dish. But I never compromise with its dressing ingredients what brings taste to this salad. Grape tomatoes or cherry tomatoes are most preferred vegetables in this Italian pasta salad but in Kolkata, India it is not widely available you may need to visit multiple departmental stores to get this. So nowadays I normally avoid to use it and add any types of tomato what is normally available in my area. I also normally keep this salad in refrigerator and enjoy it for next two or three days.
Also try these: Pomelo salad, special mango salad, everyday salad with honey dressing, saucy potato salad etc.
Now this is a healthy and tasty vegetarian Italian pasta salad but if you want to make it non-veg then you can add chicken salami to it and enjoy it. I often add black olive slices to this salad. So once you make a large bowl of this pasta salad then you can keep it at refrigerator and try this every day with different additional ingredients like cheese balls, chicken salami, black olive slices etc.
Italian pasta salad recipe
- Penne pasta - 1 lb
- Tomato - 1 cup, chopped into small pieces
- Cucumber - ½ cup, chopped
- Green beans - ½ cup, cut into 1-inch pieces
- Onion - 1 large size, cut into small pieces
- Olive oil - 1 tbsp
- White vinegar - 1 tbsp
- Lime juice - 2 tsp
- Fennel - 1 tsp
- Garlic cloves - 2 pieces, chopped
- Oregano - 1 tsp
- Black pepper - pinches of, powder
- Salt - as needed
- Boil penne pasta for 6-7 minutes, drain water and then wash in running water
- Now cut all vegetables for salad preparation in small pieces (use all raw vegetables except green beans, steam/boil green beans before adding to your bowl
- Now add all dressing ingredients in a bowl and mix all by using a hand blender or manual blender
- Then add vegetables and cooked pasta in a large bowl and toss to mix
- Spread salad dressing over vegetables & cooked pasta, mix with large spoons
- Now keep it in a refrigerator and serve it next day (spread pinches of back pepper powder before serving)
Wash your cooked pasta in running normal water to avoid stickiness
Boil green beans with pasta it saves time to prepare this Italian pasta salad
Use any other types of pasta instead of penne if you want
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