Lemon Dijon Pasta Salad

Last month, a friend graduated with his PhD in economics. For the celebration picnic, I brought pasta salad. Now, to be honest, for most of my previous pasta salad attempts I've simply used Italian dressing and store-bought pasta salad seasoning. However, because this was a special occasion, and because I had plenty of lead time, I decided to put in a bit more effort (although not as much as I'd expected!), and made a pasta salad completely from scratch. I found a great resource to do this at allrecipes.com, with their 5 steps to perfect pasta salad.

They offer general guidelines that you can follow to create a nearly infinite range of pasta salads. In order to prevent duplicating their method, I simply refer you to their page above, and list the ingredients I used for my creation below. It was, by far, the best pasta salad I've ever made, and was extremely easy as well.





Lemon Dijon Pasta Salad (for instruction, go here)

Ingredients:

• 1-lb box, rotini
• 1-lb cherry tomatoes, halved
• 1/3-cup pine nuts, roasted
• 3/4-red, yellow, and/or orange bell pepper, diced
• 2-green onions, cleaned and sliced
• 8-12 basil leaves, sliced
• 1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese, plus more to garnish
  

For the dressing, I followed this recipe, using lemon juice and Dijon mustard. Instead of using a wisk, I used our blender to mix it all up.