Pasta Salad

I attended a New Year's Eve potluck dinner and decided to make pasta salad. I can't recall if I've ever made pasta salad before, but I am definitely a fan of it myself. I drew inspiration for this dish from two recipes I found while searching Epicurious for pasta salad. Both of them were printed in Bon Appetit many, many years ago and they looked like great places to start.

Pasta Salad
(inspired by Bon Appetit recipes from September 1997 and August 2000)

Serves many

16 oz package of Fusili pasta, cooked al dente, drained and rinsed with cold water
1 bell pepper, diced
4 oz can sliced black olives
15 oz can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
15 oz can pinto beans, drained and rinsed
8 oz grape tomatoes, sliced in half
6 oz crumbled feta
1 cup parmesan cheese
1/2 cup basil, chopped well
3 tbsp capers, drained and divided
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 cup oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes, drained
6 tbsp olive oil
1 package andouille chicken sausage, sliced and sauteed


Mix the first 9 eight ingredients and 2 tbsp of the capers in a large mixing bowl. Blend the remaining capers with the remaining 4 ingredients in a food processor. Mix the dressing with the pasta salad. Done! Chill in the fridge for a few hours before serving.

I debated adding chopped sun-dried tomatoes into the salad because I love sun-dried tomatoes so much, but ultimately decided there was plenty of the sun-dried tomato flavor in the dressing. The dressing is a bit heavy, and probably should have been mixed with the pasta before any of the other ingredients were added, and could perhaps be made with white wine vinegar and less olive oil in the future.

I almost didn't add the parmesan cheese, but do not skimp out on this! It dramatically transforms the dish and blends all the flavors together.

I did forget to buy a red onion when I was at the store and I would have loved to dice one up and mix it in to provide extra texture along side the bell pepper.

As it was, I thought it tasted really good. I'm happy with my first foray into pasta salad and hope I get a chance to try more variations in the future.

Ultimately, I had a good amount of this dish leftover after the potluck dinner, so I took it home and added in the chicken sausage. The mixed in sausage worked really, really well and Brit and I ate it for our dinner tonight.