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Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Tomato Mozzarella Pesto Pasta Salad

For me dinner is often a combination of two challenges: 1. what in my fridge is perishable and in danger of not getting used? 2. How can I prepare a healthy dinner containing ingredients that won’t require an extra trip to the store?
This served quite well on achieved the objectives. The perishables involved were heirloom tomatoes from
our surprise CSA box and an opened package of mozzarella cheese (does anyone know how long that should last in the fridge? Cause I have no clue!). Long shelf life items pesto, olive oil and dry pasta (of which I have about twenty pounds in my house, such a sucker for fun shapes!) came to my rescue. Lucky for us we have enough of the ingredients to make it for dinner again tomorrow! (I may use more pesto concentrate, it was not as green as I would have liked.) Another pleasant surprise is Boy’s approval on the recipe, considering he considers tomatoes to be “eeh” which grunt I take to mean neither gross nor delicious. I hope you enjoy this as much as we did!
Ingredients:
  • 1 ½ cups dry pasta (a small shape works well, I used wheels)
  • ~¼ lb mozzarella cheese cut into small cubes
  • ~1lb tomatoes diced (I used one small and one large heirloom from our CSA box)
  • ¼ cup olive oil
  • 4 Tsp GIA pesto concentrate
Note: Whatever pesto you have on hand should work all right, this is what we had.
Instructions:
  1. Cook pasta as instructed on the package.
  2. While your pasta cooks, dice tomatoes and mozzarella combine in a medium bowl.
  3. Combine pesto concentrate with oil, pour over, tomatoes and cheese (if using premixed pesto just scoop it in).
  4. Add drained pasta to bowl and stir to combine. I let it sit stirring occasionally to combine the flavors and bring the pasta down to room temperature, because it was warm and I didn’t want hot pasta. ;)
  5. Makes three cereal bowls of pasta, which fed two of us. (Boy was hungry!)

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