Bruschetta Pasta Salad

This is one of my favorite pasta salads ever. It has a posh deli taste to it, but it's better. My biggest complaint with most pasta salad is the noodles taste like chunks of flour that take away from the flavor of the rest of the salad. This is not an issue here...

This is a recipe that slowly morphed for me. When I worked at Olive Garden many moons ago, Bruschetta Caprese was on the menu, and it was one of my favorite dishes. When they took it off the menu, I started making Bruschetta based on their Caprese, where you add the cheese. Then for purposes of taking something to a picnic, I decided to add pasta and turn it into a salad since most of the time I make Bruschetta, we end up eating it with a fork instead of scooping it on bread. But, I didn't want the flavor to be lost with the pasta, so I decided to boil my pasta with flavor.

Note: This recipe makes a lot. You may decide to half it.

Ingredients:

1 Box of Mini Farfalle Pasta
12-16 Roma Tomatoes
5 green onions
2.5 oz of fresh basil
2 pounds of Mozzarella Cheese
Bottle of Red Wine (I used Riunite Lambrusco)
Balsamic Vinegar
Extra Virgin Olive Oil


Dump pasta into a pot, and fill it with wine 1/2 covering pasta. Add enough Balsamic Vinegar to cover about 1/4 pasta. Add water to fill over pasta. Boil. Simmer until soft. When finished, drain pasta, and then rinse with cold water until pasta is cool to the touch.

In this picture, I used a veggie chopper on slice (because even though the box said it had like 5 different ways to chop veggies, there seems to be two options. Mush or slices), but you can manually chop the tomatoes by hand if you want. When I do, I just dice them, big dices you can pick up with a fork. But dice or slice the tomatoes. Then chop green onion. I usually do about 1/4 up the green because that just feels right to me, so when I say 5 green onions, that's just about 1/4 of the way up the green. Adjust the amount accordingly. You can also use regular onion. I usually aim for a teaspoon to tablespoon for every 5 tomatoes. Sometimes I don't even use onion. Then take the basil, roll it up and slice. Then cut the mozzarella into small squares.

Mix everything together with a little Olive Oil. Season with some garlic salt if desired.