Patriotic Pasta Salad
November 16, 2016 Comments
- Prep:
- 1 hour
- Cook:
- 11 minutes
- Serves:
- 8-10
Particularly when kids are concerned, colors that are on their plates matter. Color can take a dish from dull to delightful. When you want to be patriotic in the food department, you can do it up even with a pasta dish and make it red, white and blue. It' s easy to figure out what to add for red and white (hello, tomatoes and cheese). Blue is a little trickier. I opted for sliced black olives (almost blue!) and white onions soaked in colored blue water. That way, I got the blue color I wanted without an excessive amount of brightly colored dye that I didn't want.
Ingredients
Directions
-
Fill a dish with 2 cups of water. Add 5 drops of blue food coloring. Add a sliced white onion and allow it to soak for at least an hour. You can do this step the night before if you want a more intense blue color.
-
In a large pot, boil salted water and make the pasta according to package directions, until still firm but tender to the bite.
-
While the water is boiling, slice grape tomatoes in half.
-
Drain the pasta but reserve about ¼ cup of pasta water to add back in. Cool the pasta. Then, in a large bowl, add the pasta and the pasta water. Add the Italian dressing and mix. Then mix in the tomatoes, cheese and olives.
-
Once the onion has turned blue, drain the water and cut the onion sections into smaller strips or rings. Add the onions to the salad and fold them in.
- Add salt and pepper to taste.
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