Fall Harvest Salad Recipe ~ Cook with me

Hi friends and welcome back to Bloomo Home and Garden. Today we are creating in the kitchen. I want to make for you my favorite fall harvest salad. It is a great salad full of the warm fall flavors and I would love to take credit for this but I can't. This salad came to me from Inspired by Charm and Michael Wurm is a lifestyle blogger and this is his recipe. I found this about three years ago and I make it three or four times every fall and I love it. I love it for dinner, lunch and it's wonderful for gatherings and all the entertaining that you do in the fall. So let's jump into this video and make the salad. Let's get started with our ingredients. We need two medium sweet potatoes, one tablespoon olive oil, one pound of multicolored or other pasta, we need three cups of broccoli chopped into small bite-sized pieces, we need one cup of dried cranberries, one half cup of pine nuts toasted and we need a quarter cup of red onion. We're going to use one and a half cups of poppy seed dressing and I really like this Ken's Steakhouse Light. This recipe also calls for four ounces of goat cheese which I have eliminated but if you like goat cheese you can surely add it. We're just going to go in and just start peeling our sweet potato and then we're going to chop that also in bite-sized pieces. Now I really like you know the rustic chop but I also don't like having huge bites of food in my mouth when you're trying to talk or entertain. When there's people around you just have big chunks of food and it's hard to chew up so I always like to dice everything pretty small. Our sweet potato is finely chopped. We're going to place it in the oven for 400 degrees for about 25 to 27 minutes and let that roast. We're also going to drizzle it now with some olive oil and we're going to go ahead and season it at this point with salt and pepper and if you're watching your sodium intake you can use less salt or eliminate it all together. Once you've drizzled with olive oil and salt and peppered really well you want to go ahead and mix it together. I just use my hands. It's the best way to make sure that everything gets coated and all the seasoning is on and it's just going to help it caramelize better in the oven. Now we're going to move on to starting our water for our pasta and once we get the water on we're going to go back to preparing the rest of our veggies that we talked about in the beginning that broccoli needs to be very small and you can either save this piece for soup. I'm going to feed it to the chickens. They just love treats like that but I agree I cut off all the stems and when it comes to the florets I separate them and make sure that they're really small so that when you're eating them you're not having big bunches of food. It's just really awkward and inconvenient when you have big blobs of food and you're trying to eat it especially if you're going to be having this dish at a gathering. Once the broccoli is all chopped I'm going to go ahead and get started with the onion. Just need a quarter cup of this so I'm going to go ahead and chop that up. Now you can use regular onion if you don't like it. I just love the color and the sweeter taste of the red onion. I use red onion for everything. So go ahead and chop your onion and then we're going to move on to the next item to prepare and that is going to be getting the pine nuts ready to toast. Now if you've never toasted pine nuts before it's really really simple. We're just going to go ahead and putting any oil to the pan. We are going to go ahead and just put the pine nuts in there. Now pine nuts are a softer nut and they are going to require you to babysit them. You don't have to stir every moment. I'm just making sure that they're all spread around and they're flat on the pan. You want to do that for sure but you don't have to stir them every second. Just don't go too far because they will burn and you certainly don't want your burner up too high. You just want to keep this on low. You're right here in the kitchen so just keep it there. Now our water is boiling ready for our pasta and I want to know how do you flavor your pasta because pasta by itself can be pretty bland and I know a lot of people salt their pasta at this point. I also put in olive oil because it could stick or clump together. Let me know in the comments below just how you flavor your pasta at this point. Do you salt it? Do you add a clove of garlic? Do you add oil? What kind of oil do you use to keep it from clumping together? What big secrets do you have for cooking pasta? And in a moment we're going to talk about all the different options for the pasta in this dish but right now I want to remind you that we are cooking this pasta al dente. We don't want it super soft and mushy. We want to keep it so there's a little bit of bite left in the noodle itself. So we're going to go back to our pine and they're pretty well toasted and they're ready. I see they're just a nice brown. So let's put our pasta in our dish and putting the ingredients together when it's warm is a great idea because that pasta is warm and it helps absorb those flavors better. And then we're gonna go ahead and follow me over on Instagram because I want to know how you did your pasta because we'll talk about the pasta now. So you could totally do spaghetti squash for your pasta. You could do zoodles for your pasta. Zucchini into zoodles. You could do cauliflower as a option if you're doing the keto diet or just gluten-free. You could do that as well. Now I did add a little bit of sauce in here to start mixing. Our potatoes are done roasting and aren't they gorgeous? So if you're going to use those other options for your pasta in this dish you would probably only parboil just a little bit to soften. Not too much because you wouldn't want them to get mushy as well in this dish. So we're just going to finish up add in the rest of our salad dressing and you can see all the pretty colors and flavors and my mouth is just watering just watching this back. So go ahead and cover it up with some plastic wrap or a lid. All those flavors can come together and chill and this will be wonderful later if you want to because I can never wait that long to savor this wonderful fall harvest pasta salad. So give this video a thumbs up if you're going to be bringing this to your next backyard bonfire, tailgating, thanksgiving, friendsgiving or just your next dinner. Subscribe, ring that bell so that you'll be with us on our next video. I hope to create with you again real soon. Until then be blessed, be safe and I'll see you soon.