Today on The Stay At Home Chef
I'm showing you how to make Easy Classic Pasta Salad.
Pasta salad is a classic and we totally love
it in our family.
Today I'm showing you an easy version of pasta salad that includes a homemade Italian dressing.
To start you'll need to bring a large pot
of water to a boil on the stove.
Cook 1 pound of rotini pasta according to
the package directions.
You can also use tri-colored rotini or penne or shells, 
any bite sized pasta will work.
Once it finishes cooking you'll want to drain the pasta from the water
and run it under cold water to cool the pasta off.
While the pasta is cooking we can go ahead
and prep our other ingredients.
Like halving some cherry or grape tomatoes,
and if you've ever watched my show before
you know that I have a great trick for halving tomatoes.
All you need is a tupperware lid.
Just get a pile of tomatoes,
put the lid on to hold them still,
and gently press them down while you run a knife underneath and halve them all at once.
Look at that!
It makes it a whole lot easier to halve an
entire pint of cherry tomatoes.
Next you'll need some mini mozzarella balls,
and we are going to slice those in half as
well.
Now you can leave those whole 
because they are already pretty small,
but I like to halve them so that I have more bites of mozzarella throughout my pasta salad.
Next we can go ahead and put together our dressing.
First you'll need 1/2 cup of extra virgin olive oil,
1/4 cup of red wine vinegar,
if you don't have red wine vinegar you could also use another mild vinegar
like white wine vinegar or apple cider vinegar,
you'll also need 1 teaspoon of lemon juice,
2 teaspoons of Italian seasoning,
1 teaspoon of sugar,
1/2 teaspoon of garlic powder,
and a pinch of red pepper flakes.
You'll want to whisk this all together.
If you wanted to use a bottled Italian salad dressing you'd need about 3/4 - 1 cup of dressing.
Now our pasta should be about done so we can just pour that in directly with our dressing.
It actually saves us some dishes to make our dressing directly in the bowl we're going to put our pasta into.
All that's left to do is to add in our delicious toppings.
So we'll add in all of that cheese and the
tomatoes.
We'll grab the ones that fell there.
Then we'll add in some sliced black olives,
a red diced onion,
1 cup of mini pepperonis,
and last of all some chopped peperoncinis.
I love the extra zing that the peperoncinis
give to the pasta salad.
All that's left to do is stir this together.
And since the dressing is on the bottom
you want to make sure you scoop all the way down so that everything gets mixed together.
Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let it
chill in the fridge for at least 1 hour before serving.
Then you're ready to eat!
Thanks for watching!
You can find the full written recipe in the
video description.
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