Roasted Vegetable Pasta Salad with Sundried Tomato Pesto
I love making pasta salads, that said, in my lifetime, I’ve had some truly awful ones. Nothing conveys misery more than a dreary, under-dressed, water logged tumble of flabby cooked pasta. As culinary crimes go, this is one of the worst. There’s a few tricks to making a good one. Here’s how.
You must cook your pasta firmly al dente, you’ll see in the instagram reel I cut through a piece of pasta to check, my penne still had a bite in the very centre. I am making this pasta salad now to take to a friend’s BBQ this evening with the kids, the pasta will sit in the fridge for 8 hours, so the firm bite is good at this point.
Don’t refresh your pasta when cooked to cool it down, chuck a big handleful of ice in there to mix through to cool it down and will add a bit more liquid to the cooked pasta.
Crucial to a really good pasta salad is the thing you choose to dress it with, in this case, a really flavoursome pesto, it’s so turbo charged in flavour, it’s almost too much to eat on its own, this is good, because the pasta needs a super flavoursome dressing.
Roasting a load of veg is not only terribly simple, but will impart sweet juicy texture to the pasta salad. You can’t really go wrong here, just roast the lot off until sweet and caramelised, whole red chilli to skin and finely chop through the salad is a winner. Likewise, some good chubby chickpeas or beans are only going to add to the texture here, and texture is always a good thing when it comes to pasta salads.
And that’s it, other than gargantuan amounts of good olive oil and lemon juice. I might also chop a huge bunch of herbs through this just before we leave for the BBQ this evening.
INGREDIENTS
Taking this to a BBQ tonight, it will easily feed x8 as part of a larger spread.
1 packet of penne pasta
1 7OOg chickpeas, drained
2 courgettes, cut into coins
3 or 4 peppers, cut into cubes
2 red onions, cut into slim wedges
2 whole red chillies
3 tbsp sun-dried tomatoes
1 tbsp capers
2 garlic cloves
1 - 2 lemons, juice, mine were small, I used 2
Around 60mls olive oil, plus extra to roast and serve
Small bunch of parsley
Salt and pepper, to taste
Big bunch of herbs, basil, oregano or parsley, finely chopped, to serve
METHOD
Arrange the veg on a tray, keep the chillies whole, season well with salt and pepper and drizzle over with some olive oil. roast in hot oven at 180C until softened. I also grilled mine under a very hot grill for the final 5 minutes to get a little extra colour and to blacken the chilli skin.
Cook your pasta until firmly al dente, check the pasta cooking instructions and I knocked about 1/4 off the cook time. Drain and cool in a wide shallow bowl.
Add the chickpeas and chuck some ice in amongst the lot to help cool the pasta down.
Make the pesto, blend the sun-dried tomatoes, capers, garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and parsley to make the pesto. Check the seasoning, it shouldn’t need all that much with all that flavour.
Dress the pasta and chickpeas with the pesto, add the roasted veg, finely chop the skinned roasted chilli and add that, now it’s really just down to how much more olive oil you think the pasta salad needs, add that in and mix well.
To serve, chop a big bunch of herbs (basil, oregano or parsley) and mix through to serve.