Ask Mr. Foodie

Get Mr. Foodie's mother-approved pasta salad recipe.

Q. Do you like pasta salad?

A. Yes, it’s the perfect barbecue side or lunchtime main dish. That said, I don’t like store-bought pasta salad. Usually, it’s crap drenched in gloppy, overly sweet, oily dressing.

A better way is to do it yourself. Combine vegetables, cheeses and (perhaps) meats with pasta. Rather than marinara or alfredo, make a salad dressing. Once you cook the pasta, toss ingredients together, set in the refrigerator and bring out at barbecue time. The variations are endless: use different colors of pasta, swap ingredients in and out.

There are only three rules (loose ones at that):

• Everything that goes into the pasta salad should be fork-sized, so the people eating the salad don’t make a mess.
• Keep anything with a mayo-based dressing as cold as possible before service, Throw it away after your barbecue if it’s been out in the sun. Butt explosions are not hot.
• It’s kind of silly to serve pasta salad with burgers or sandwiches, unless you like doubling up on carbs and starches. Pasta salad goes best as a main course or with grilled chicken, fish, steaks or vegetarian skewers.

Here's my latest pasta salad recipe, which got mom’s seal of approval on Mother’s Day.

Ingredients:
two 16-ounce packages farfalle (bowties) pasta
Juice of 4 lemons plus zest of the lemons
one-half cup (or more) olive oil
1 package grape tomatoes, halved lengthwise
one-fourth cup blue-cheese crumbles
1 bunch asparagus, tough ends removed
one-half bag of frozen green peas, thawed at room temperature, then placed in the refrigerator
1 red and 1 yellow bell pepper (julienne, then half the julienne strips into fork-sized pieces)
dried herbs such as basil, marjoram, dill, thyme, rosemary (to taste)
one-half bunch parsley, chopped roughly
one-quarter cup good olives, halved lengthwise
4 slices red onion, quartered
some kind of expensive salami, sliced into little strips (max ? cup)
salt and fresh-ground pepper

Serves 8 to 10 rather hungry people

To prepare:

1. Prep all ingredients in advance. Set in separate bowls. Then assemble. (This is called mise en place and is the foundation of restaurant cooking.)
2. Boil salted water in a huge pot. First, add asparagus. Boil for 1 minute exactly. Remove with tongs, leaving water to boil for pasta. Immediately plunge asparagus into a bowl of ice water to stop cooking. Then chop into pieces 1 1/2 inches long and place back in the refrigerator. Begin cooking farfalle (about 13 minutes).
3. In a very large casserole dish with a lid, add all of the vegetables except asparagus and green peas, then blue cheese and salami.