Quick & Easy Pasta Salad #pasta #food

I'm Teresa. Today I'm going to be making pasta salad. Now pasta salad is a dish that we really enjoy and as the weather warms up you think about sometimes wanting food that is light and cool and refreshing and so this is one of our go to dishes for that. So let me grab my apron and we'll get started. The pasta salad recipe that I use, I include all of these ingredients. Now some people like pasta salad that's maybe more twangy or has more vinegar in it or some may like more mayonnaise in it. I'm kind of in between. I like an in-between flavor so what I do is I mix mayonnaise with my Italian dressing and it's kind of like the best of both worlds. I use all of the ingredients here. I've already got my pasta boiled and ready to mix so let me get started cutting this up and we'll go from there. Food chopped ready to go. Food prep is one of my favorite things. I could do that all day. Turn on my praise and worship music and food prep but it's time to mix it. Now what I said earlier I do is I mix up the Italian dressing. I personally like the Olive Garden so I use almost a whole bottle just shy of a bottle of that and I put in a couple of heaping spoons of mayonnaise. Now the reason I go ahead and mix this in with the dressing is so if you mix the dressing in with the pasta you're stirring it then if you add mayonnaise you're stirring it some more then when you add all this you're stirring it so it could tear the pasta so you want to stir the pasta as little as possible so if you go ahead and mix this ahead of time that's just one less time you have to stir. Now this was the ranch packet seasoning there's probably about two tablespoons worth of that in there. I'm gonna go ahead and dump that in with it. All right let me grab my pan. Okay so like I said this is going to make a big making of this so you're gonna need a big pan to mix it in and then you can of course transfer it to your dish and yeah you think gosh that all the stuff you're adding you've got more of that than you do the pasta but that's the way you want it. You're gonna want to have more of the vegetables than you do pasta and the cheese. And as this sets the pasta will soak up some of that liquid and it'll just be good. After you get it mixed up if you see that you prefer more liquid you can add the rest of the dressing like I said I don't use quite the whole bottle. If you see you don't have quite enough mayonnaise just add to it until it's the way you like it. All right let me grab a dish to put it in. A lot of pasta. This will be great for 4th of July get-together or any time you're outside and need a light fresh dish. There you go!