Main Street Pasta Salad
Ingredients
(Assume everything is organic.)
Fresh
- 6-8 oz block Havarti cheese, diced
- 2 heads of Broccoli, very-ends only
- 2 cloves garlic, minced (see notes)
- 2 Bell Peppers, diced (anything but green)
- 15 oz Black olives, Sliced or small whole
- 1/2 Red onion, diced (Get one the size of your fist)
- 6-8 oz Summer sausage, diced
- 4-5 Mini Cucumbers, diced
Grocery/Pantry
- 1.25 pounds of Dialinti pasta (backup options listed below)
- Just do a single 16oz box if you’re feeling lazy
Seasonings
- Hidden Valley Ranch seasoning + Dry Italian Seasoning (see Notes)
- Whatever Italian dressings you have on hand (see Notes)
- Garlic Expressions Dressing (It’s a garlic-based vinaigrette) Try and seek this out, find an alternative or omit this ingredient entirely.
Method
Cook your pasta as per the directions for the type of pasta you are using. In most recipes we found online, they suggested using “cold pasta” for the recipe or left-over pasta. Without worry, if you rinse your pasta with cold water after cooking that will certainly make it cool enough for this pasta salad.
While your pasta is cooking, bust out your favorite knife and start prepping your other ingredients: Havarti cheese, garlic, broccoli, onion, bell peppers, cucumber, and summer sausage. Open and drain your Black olives.
You will need a fairly large container to mix this all together. Ideally you can also use this same container to let the pasta salad sit in after it’s all put together. Letting the flavors marry together as a single batch for at least a couple of hours is an essential step. We use a Rubbermaid 2.5 gallon container. (Amazon link below)
Once all your ingredients have been added to your large container, it is time to add whatever seasonings you see fit. Don’t go out to the store to buy spices for this recipe. You will more than likely have what you need in your pantry already. Nothing fancy is required, as your dressings will pack a lot of punch. This is where we add our secret weapon, the dry dressing concoction mentioned above. With all the prepared vegetables and pasta in the large container, dust the entire top of the salad like you’re topping a dessert with powered sugar. Be liberal.
Slap on a pair of vinyl gloves and get your hands in there and mix it up. Mix everything together until the moisture of the prepared vegetables has consumed the seasonings. Now take your gloves off and pull out your salad dressing lineup. Typically, we marry together three different dressings, two different Italians and then another distant relative that pairs well with everything else we got going on.
Italian Dressing Lineup
- Newman’s Own Organics Italian
- Girard’s Champagne Vinaigrette
- Olive Garden Light Italian Dressing
Non-Italian Lineup
- Garlic Expressions Dressing
- Sweet Onion Bacon
- Briannas French Vinaigrette
- Harissa Ranch
Add a bit of each of the dressings to the pasta salad. I low-balled how much dressing we should use in the first couple of batches. The amount of dressing you add will depend on your particular taste, but know that the pasta absorbs quite a bit of the dressing when you let the batch sit for a while. It’s not the end of the world if you have to add more dressing later. You’d rather have drier pasta salad than have it floating in its own dressing. The soft cubes of Havarti cheese are a good visual indicator as to how dressed up the salad is.
Have lots of containers to pass out this salad to your family and friends. It looks great in those small Ball Mason jars. N’Joy!
Notes
- You’re only using a small section of the larger broccoli. Save the stalks and anything else not used and add to a large freezer bag for making vegetable stock in the future.
- Rubbermaid 2.5 gallon container (this is not an Affiliate link!)
on Garlic
- Legit cloves not the stuff in jars floating in oil
- In a hurry? Granulated garlic
on Black Olives
- Rarely spend too much time getting fancy with olives as they are all bathing in large amounts of salt.
- Drain these well, but straining is unnecessary unless you feel inclined.
on Summer Sausage
- Because Usingers is not readily available all over the states, the closest distant relative is Johnsonville. You’ll understand just how far that distance is if you come to Wisconsin and enjoy Usingers sausage!
Backup pasta options
- Tri-Colored Rotini
- Mini Farfalle
- Farfalle
- Cavatappi
on Seasonings
- Grocery stores sell packets of dry salad dressing bases you can use to make your own dressing at home. They also sell packs of four of five packets in a box. Grab yourself a box of Hidden Valley Ranch mix and also dry Italian Dressing Mix by whatever brand makes you happy inside. We empty all the packets of seasonings into a Ball Mason jar and shake it up to blend them all together.