Fall in Love with Pasta Salad

Let's face it, we've all tasted some UN-appetizing pasta salad in our time, maybe even been the culprit in making it! Perhaps some of us are disenchanted by too many lack luster, ugly, mushy pasta salads. (I definitely used to fit in this category)

That ends now.

Chef Lou makes various delectable pasta salads sure to change your mind and make you hungry for more. One of these new breeds of pasta salad is our Asian Pasta Salad.

Asian Pasta Salad

The salad has bowtie pasta, craisins, mandarin oranges, honey roasted peanuts, sesame seeds, chicken bits and spinach.

We've served this as a side for a corporate lunch, at a banquet, and just recently as an appetizer!

We add fresh spinach last to keep it fresh and crunchy. We also blanch our pasta as soon as it finishes cooking to keep it from getting mushy and broken up.

When serving it as an appetizer we change a couple of things:

• We change the bowtie pasta to ditalini pasta
• Add some bright green edamame and use less spinach
• For plating we add crunchy rice sticks and black sesame seeds.
• Serve it on an Asian spoon

Each spoon is individually arranged with rice sticks and a diagonally-cut scallion

Then for the buffet we either serve it on a tray or on our cupcake stand. It sure is one great tasting appetizer!

Blanching

Chef Lou's cooking tip is all about Blanching

Blanching is a cooking process where you take a food, usually vegetables, fruit, or pasta, submerge it in boiling water, then after a time, submerge it in an ice bath to stop the cooking progress. There are many ways where blanching is needed but I will only talk about two uses.

For green beans, asparagus, etc:
Green beans are a little too crispy to eat raw, but sometimes an inexperienced cook will cook the beans too much and they turn out mushy. Blanching the beans takes out some of the crunch and cleans the vegetable of lingering bacteria.

To blanch the green beans, add the beans to a pot of boiling water. Cook for about a minute or so (asparagus takes about 30 seconds) until it changes color. Immediately remove the beans from the hot water and submerge in an ice bath (water and ice). The ice bath is very important because it stops the cooking process, keeping your beans at the right firmness.

 Cook the beans in the hot water until they change into a bright green color

Bonus tip: Sometimes we buy green beans at the store and they go bad within a couple of days and we didn't even have a change to cook them. Try blanching your green beans when you get home and they will last much longer in the fridge

For pasta:
Add pasta to a pot of boiling water and cook as directed on the box/package. When the noodles reach "al dente", immediately remove it from the hot water and submerge into an ice bath. Again this stops the cooking process and keeps your noodles from falling apart later as you start mixing it up.

Add this technique to your culinary repertoire and you will see improvement in your food!