How to Make Pasta salad | Quick Appetizers | KitchenNotesFromNancy

hey y'all and welcome back to my kitchen with New Year's Eve coming up I know some of you all probably have a few parties to go to so today and for the next couple days I want to share with you some quick and easy recipes that can serve as appetizers for New Year's Eve or even your super Super Bowl parties so if you want to learn how to make some fast easy but delicious recipes stay tuned okay y'all it is Christmas morning and we're going over to some of our friends house later and that's what we're gonna have dinner and so I am taking pasta salad as my so I just figured I would show y'all my quick recipe for pasta salad it's super super simple and we're gonna get right to it okay first we're gonna start by cooking the pasta so I'm just gonna salt the water like I showed you in my macaroni recipe it's much easier to salt the water than it is to try to go back and salt the pasta later then I'm gonna take about two tablespoons of vegetable oil and put in there it just helps stop it just helps to prevent the noodles from basically sticking together and since this is already at a rolling boil I'm gonna go ahead and dump my tricolor rotini it's a 12 ounce container and I'm gonna do the whole own container so I'm just gonna roll that over in there and give it a quick stir now this is gonna come back to a boil and y'all don't pay this any mind this is just I got some turkey necks on over here to go with the rest of our dinner and I'm gonna use some of the broth off of those turkey necks to go in my dressing so I'm just gonna bring this back up to a boil and then once they're done we'll take them out those will cook for about eight minutes or so until they're al dente and so while these are cooking we're gonna go over to the other counter and cut up our tomatoes and bell pepper all right so while the pastas cooking I've watched the tomatoes and bell pepper I'm gonna go ahead and chop these up now I have a chopper but I don't like it to get too mushy so when I'm making pasta salad I just do it by hand this pasta salad is super sweet super easy I'm kind of glad people like it it makes my life a lot easier sometimes when I'm taking things over to my friend's house so what I do with these once I get them cut in little strips I just take a look so I'm gonna finish cutting these up and then we'll chop up the tomatoes all right so the bell pepper is chopped up and so it's now it's time to start doing the cherry tomatoes and the cut that I do on these are really simple I just go across a one time and then I go down the middle so I just put them I cut them in quarters nothing super fancy I used to use a whole tomato but then I found it was just easier to cut up the cherry tomatoes when I use the whole tomato the juice from it would seem to run out and and I noticed that with these are cherry tomatoes or great tomatoes I didn't have that issue so I'm gonna get all of these cut up and then by then it should be time to drain our pasta and so real quick this one is kind of big so I just cut it in threes so you know just cut it to your side's preference so I'm gonna keep doing this and by then my pasta should be ready to take out and so it's been about eight minutes so it's time to drink the pasta so I'm just gonna dump that over it in there and let it drain and I'm actually just gonna let it sit here in the sink while I finish cutting up the tomatoes i'ma run a little cold water over it [Music] and this step isn't necessary I just do it so that the pasta doesn't get overly done just let that water ran out of there okay so the veggies are chopped up the pasta is still cooling I'm going to now take some ham and dice it up you could use any type of meat that you would like you know turkey or chicken or whatever so if this was going home to my actual family I would take the I would not be using him so it was going to my to my family I wouldn't use ham I'll be using turkey cuz most of the people in my family don't eat ham so so I'm gonna get this diced up and then we'll get ready to assemble of the final product okay so the ham is diced up so we're going to jump right into the assembly process so I have my aluminum pan and I'm going to take that pasta so now that the pastas in gonna go ahead and grab some of the ham the end the tomatoes and the green onion I mean in the green bell pepper my mind was on onion because I was gonna tell y'all I don't put onion in my pasta salad I know a lot of people do because I don't like onions I don't cook I lose in my pasta salad because I don't like olives um and I'm not going to make a dish that I'm not going to eat and so that's partly why my pasta salad is so simple I'm just gonna go ahead and dump all the meat in here cuz I'm not gonna do anything else oh yeah I'm not going to make a dish that I'm not gonna eat so I only put things in it that I eat I use the colored rotini because I like it it makes it pretty if you want to add more color of course you can use red bell pepper green bell pepper i mean yellow bell pepper but i don't use red bell pepper because the tomatoes are in there so that gives me color on that part now I'm gonna go ahead and I'm going to sprinkle sometimes I add cheese sometimes I've done today is one of those days where I am gonna add a little bit of cheese gonna sprinkle just about a handful of cheese and this is just a mild cheddar cheese Sam cheese I used on top of my macaroni so toss that cheese in there nd in the finishing part there are people who seasoned their pasta salad now because I use this fancy Italian dressing I don't really see the line if anything I might put just a little bit of onion powder in it because um like I said a lot of people like onion but because I don't eat raw onion I'm not I don't put it in but I may put just a little bit of that in here but typically I just go straight and straight Italian dressing so this recipe is super super simple it's good for a day like today where you know you just want something a little bit lighter while you wait for Christmas dinner it's good for the fourth of July it's good for it I mean pasta salad is good anytime you want to eat it my family eats it a lot we eat it for almost every occasion if there's a birthday party or something like that so it is one of those dishes that appears at my house all the time I should have opened this before I got on camera but hey Oh was i shaking it up and I just put a generous amount of the Italian dressing on here so this is a 24 ounce bottle so that's probably about 12 ounces and then I just stir it to kind of see um how saturated now there are other people who use other types of dresses I just like the taste of the zesty Italian so that's what I use the thing about pasta salad you can dress it up any way you want you can put um I lives in it you can put peppers in it I mean like jalapeno peppers in it you can use regular rotini you can use corkscrew pasta you you spaghetti I've seen people do um spaghetti pasta salad so it's just all in to what you know your taste level and what your preference is I'm gonna reach over real quick to my spice rack and grab on just a little black pepper and then a little onion powder I'm gonna do a few sprinkles of black pepper and um you again you're not gonna send me your salt that zesty Italian dressing is salty enough that's just a little onion powder they don't bump up the flavor in a little bit and I'm gonna mix this in in y'all just that fast it's done literally you can cook you can make this in 15 minutes and that includes the time it takes to cook your pasta um so here we go there's my pasta salad yet I am going to get this covered up and it'll be ready to go when it's time for us to leave thank you again and see you next time thank you for watching them too watching until the end of the video I hope you learn something helpful that can help you in your kitchen if you did please let me know by liking this video below leaving me a friendly comment and also subscribe and better yet if you like what you see don't forget to share with your friends until next time bye guys

Channel: Kitchen Notes from Nancy

Views: 141,537

Keywords: gina young, divascancook, phillyboyjay, 80cooks, laurainthekitchen

Id: B4e6TiIe8ck

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 26 2018