Editors' Pick
Italian Pasta Salad
"Delicious and colorful pasta salad with a fresh summer taste. Easy and fast."
photo by DeliciousAsItLooks
- Ready In:
- 35mins
- Ingredients:
- 8
- Serves:
-
8
ingredients
- 1 bag dried multi-colored spiral shaped pasta
- 1 cucumber, diced with peels on
- 1 package pepperoni, quartered
- 1 cup sliced celery
- 1 medium bell pepper, diced
- 1⁄2 cup sliced black olives
- assorted fresh vegetable, diced
- 1 bottle Italian salad dressing, chilled
directions
- Cook pasta and rinse in cold water until cool.
- Toss with all veggies.
- Chill until ready to serve.
- Just before serving, pour Italian dressing over all and mix until everything is well coated. (Leftovers do not keep very well. Everything gets rather soggy so dress only what you need or dress each individual serving)
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Reviews
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This easy salad was great for a quick summer meal! We all loved it and have enough leftovers for lunches. I made a few minor changes to the original recipe. Instead of pepperoni, I used leftover chicken and feta cheese. -
Looks delicious but I always put cheese and onion in my pasta salad.
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This is a GREAT recipie! I used a box of Barilla's Fiori, little flower shaped pasta. DH ate a huge bowl with dinner and I finished what was left for breakfast. I added some raw summer squash, lightly steamed fresh green beans, some leftover corn cut off the cob. a chopped up fresh tomato, and chopped sweet-spicy red onion. This is my kind of recipie. -
This was a very good pasta salad that we really enjoyed. My vegetables stayed crisp and we enjoyed the leftovers. It didn't get soggy - I'm not sure why. The only extra vegetable I added was diced carrots. Also, I didn't use an entire package of pepperoni. Thanks Karen for a great recipe! -
I disagree about the dressing. I make my pasta the night before and add my seasonings and half the dressing so the pasta has a chance to absorb the flavor. For 1 pound of pasta I use 1 teaspoons of celery seed, 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of Italian Seasoning and 1/2 to 1 teaspoon of coarsely ground pepper. Before serving I add vegetables and 2 to 4 ozs of grated parmesan cheese as well as the rest of the dressing.
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Tweaks
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This easy salad was great for a quick summer meal! We all loved it and have enough leftovers for lunches. I made a few minor changes to the original recipe. Instead of pepperoni, I used leftover chicken and feta cheese.
RECIPE SUBMITTED BY
<p>Click here to get to chat: http://koach.com/index.php?id=chatlogin&client=web&chan=%23Recipezaar The picture above is of me, but is not a very recent one. It was taken during a very sweet time of my life many years ago. The face is mostly the same, but atlas....everything has aged by about 20 years. I am a little heavier, my hair is not permed anymore and is straight with a slight wave to it, almost to my waist with a touch of grey at my temples. I like the picture because it reflects me and my love of the beautiful Colorado Rocky Mountains near Wellington Lake. I am grandma to Xavier Pryce (aka Zavy) who is 7, his little brother, Rylan James, who is 6 and Baby Wyatt who will be 3 in December. They and their momma are the light of my heart. I enjoy hosting a chat room called #Recipezaar on koach.com, named after the old site. Many people don't know this, but I was Recipezaar's first paid employee when Food.com was Recipezaar and Gay and Troy owned it. I am finding it difficult to spend as much time here as I used to. I am retired now and spend my days watch my grandsons while their momma works. Trying to spend time on the computer with 3 rowdy, hyper little boys in the house can be frustrating and sometimes even impossible unless their momma is home to keep an eye on things while grandma indulges herself on the computer.I wish I was as witty a writer as some of the others here on food.com, but I am afraid that all of my creativity and talent goes into my cooking, but I will give this my best shot anyway. I am a single mother to one 25 year old daughter (Alicia) and grandma to Xavier Pryce, Rylan James and Wyatt William. They all still live with me, so I am pretty much the boy's other parent. Cooking is never a chore for me. I collect cookbooks and am an avid reader of anything but have a particular love of horror novels. Stephen King and Dean Koontz are my favorite authors. Although I have degree in office management and graduated with a 3.8 GPA, I must be Food's worst spelling member so please excuse me if you notice it in my posts and if you notice it in my recipes, then my thanks in advance for editing the recipe to be spelled correctly if you have done so. My screen name is pretty simple and easy to remember, but sometimes people do ask me why it says Karen from Colorado instead of Karen from California. It used to be Karen IN Colorado until I moved here to Southern California to be near my sister, Morti, after our parent's deaths in 1996 and 97 and the loss of my job in Colorado in 2002. I tried Karen In California after moving, but it just didn't seem like me so I changed it to Karen FROM Colorado which will always be home to me no matter where my address is at the time. I was born there and will always love that bright and beautiful state. Especially my beloved Rocky Mountains where I spent so much of my time while living there all of my life. If you find yourself using one of my recipes as your dinner tonight, please feel free to change it to suit your own tastes. I will not mind in the least. It is what I would do if the recipe were posted by you. Your ideas might be much better then mine and just might make the recipe even better then I thought it was when I posted it. Please do mention the changes and results in your review even if the change didn't work out like you thought it might. I truly do welcome the feedback and promise not to jump all over you if you make this your practice. All I ask is that you not re-submit my recipe as yours with those changes unless they are major changes. Mind if I ask for an inspired by recipe whatever by Karen From Colorado if you do find yourself changing a recipe so much that it becomes a different dish? I have no secrets, so if there is anything else you wish to know about me, then never feel afraid to ask me. I will let you know if your question is too personal. Most likely the only thing I will not give out to most people is my address, phone number and my last name. My thoughts on controversial threads as a forum host: Often (very often), I would wish to post my thoughts and disgust about certain topics just as many others do in these forums. I, too, have an opinion most times and would love to blast certain people with them despite the fact that my opinion is just one more in a vast sea of opinions. However; I have learned long ago that my opinion really is just one more opinion and no one really gives a &%$@ what I think about certain topics, so why put myself out there for others to ridicule me for them. There is ALWAYS someone who will. There will ALWAYS be someone that will move heaven and earth to make you see things their way. I am perfectly happy with seeing things my way and it really doesn't matter to me if others don't view things the way I do. Opinions are not facts. They are opinions only and I don't consider them to be a learning tool. They should not be used as one. If anyone wishes to teach me something, then I hope they will do so with good, solid facts. Not with an opinion. As a forum host, I personally, feel a duty to set an example. I will not be baited into arguments on the forums. I consider it smarter then getting down and rolling in the mud with someone who just likes the excitement of controversial threads in order to entertain others. I will not respond to posts directed towards me with the intentions of dragging me down with them to the bowels of hate and discontent. People that wish to do so can take their best shot at me, but I will not be engaged. In my opinion (told you I had one), that makes me smarter. I will not be the one signing the TOS again. My thoughts on recipe reviews: Please be honest in your reviews. Even a low, but well written, well thought out review can be helpful to other cooks. I have experienced that made a recipe with 50 5 star reviews and hated it thing and wondered why everyone thought it was so delicious. I always think twice about reviewing recipes like that, but I make myself do it because it is what I want others to do. I hate the idea of bringing someones reviews down even a little bit with my less then loved it review, but if we don't, the review system is useless. I don't watch my statistics so much, but I know others do. I still love getting reviews on my recipes. Some make me laugh, some make me sigh and some make my day, but I never let one ruin my day because as nice as it is to read someone's thoughts on one of my recipes (especially one I created myself), it is just not THAT important in the grand scheme of things. The only reviews that really tick me off are retaliatory reviews. Someone's feelings got hurt so they decide to hit back. That is just childish and stupid. I have never had one, but I have read some left for other people. 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We ended up feeding this dinner to the disposal. is also useless. Why didn't it work for you? Was one flavor over powering the rest of the dish? Was it too dry? Too watery? Too bland? Do you have any suggestions for other people that might want to try this recipe? Was the fact that you tossed it into the disposal really necessary to your review? This kind of review is also acceptable on Food, but nothing in that review is helpful to anyone at all. It will also get an unhelpful from me, helping to send it to the back of the list of helpful reviews. Any review that leaves only stars, whether they be 5 stars or 1 star is useless to me. Why did you love it or hate it? Those will get an unhelpful vote. Any 5 star review that doesn't express why this recipe was so great will also get an unhelpful vote. My DH came back for thirds! doesn't tell me anything more then he must have been really hungry that night. Was the recipe easy to prepare? Was it well written? Did all the flavors meld together perfectly? Did you have to substitute any ingredients for taste, diet, or because you can't get an ingredient? Did your changes work? Did you make it just as it was written? Tell us why it was so great. As recipes posters, please never feel the need to thank me for reviewing one of your recipes. My review is in thanks to you for sharing your recipe. You gave me the chance to try something new and for that, that I am grateful. Thank you for posting it so that I may experience something new whether in cooking it or in tasting it. You did me the favor by posting the recipe so that I could make it. I have prepared and enjoyed foods that I would never have tried before if people like you had not shared your recipe. You deserve the thanks. Not me for eating it. If I gave you a cup of coffee, you would most likely say thank you. If I said thank you for the thank you, it kind of throws off the whole exchange. I appreciate your for taking the time to view and read my profile. Your taking that time shows an interest in my ideas and in me as a person and I take that as the greatest compliment possible on Food.com. ****************************************************** I didn't have potatoes, so I substituted rice. I didn't have paprika, so I used another spice. I didn't have tomato sauce, I used tomato paste; A whole can, not a half can - I don't believe in waste. A friend gave me the recipe; she said you couldn't beat it. There must be something wrong with her, I couldn't even eat it!</p>
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