The BEST Pasta Salad

Meet your new summer bestie:

A stupidly easy Italian pasta salad with rotini, juicy tomatoes, fresh mozzarella, red onion, salami, olives, herbs, and a drench of quick homemade Italian dressing.

If you want to know what I’ve eaten for 4 of my last 5 meals, it’s THIS SUMMER ESSENTIAL. We are kind of having a moment here.

In my mind, a nice classic pasta salad serves one of two scenarios:

• Attending a picnic, potluck, or other end-of-summer-everyone-bring-something type party;
• Addressing the leftover meat, cheese, and vegetables in my fridge and making them into a meal that I pretty much want to eat 24/7.

This pasta salad will do both for ya.

Just… some stuff.

It’s very flexible. These are my favorite pasta salad mix-ins:

Good, spicy salami. Yummy cheeses. Tomatoes or some other friendly non-threatening vegetable. Greens of some sort – even if it’s just fresh parsley. Olives and red onions and pepperoncini.

Also, we need pasta with good solid texture and shape to absorb all the sauce. I like rotini. (Also, DeLallo! It’s our favorite. The semi-rough texture i