The book has several pasta salad recipes and a guide for building your own pasta salad. I’m not a huge pasta salad fan but I’d picked up a box of black pepper barilotti pasta at Trader Joe’s and thought it would be good in a pasta salad with salami so I tried the recipe for pasta salad with roasted red peppers, salami, mozzarella and croutons on p 285 of Six Seasons of Pasta.
The recipe lightly dresses the pasta with vinegar and olive oil while it’s still warm, then adds more to dress the full salad. I’ve seen that done with potato salad but not with pasta though it makes sense. I had a jar of little cheese-stuffed red peppers (also from TJ's) that I quartered and threw in in place of the roasted red peppers and fresh mozzarella. I added cooked zucchini and raw tomato that weren’t in the recipe. This book includes the same torn croutons recipe as in Six Seasons with instructions to let the salad sit for 15-30 min before serving so they can soak up some of the juices. A good call.
