Recipe: Vegan Pesto Pasta Salad
Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a commission if you click a link and purchase something. I only include links for products and services I love and believe in. Please check out my disclosure policy for more details!Hello, and welcome back to Dairy-Free State after a long hiatus! My first year of graduate school is under my belt (summer projects not included) and I’m happy to be back with more recipes and more projects. My hope is never to go this long again without posting, and I’m overflowing with ideas for new posts, so it seems like that hope will go fulfilled.
Now, to the post you’ve been waiting for, a new recipe! I actually found the original, dairy-containing recipe for this vegan pesto pasta salad on the Food Network website and made some revisions. The ingredients and amounts I used are specified below.
I found this recipe because I was looking for something to make that called for a lot of basil. We got a decent amount of basil from our last Brewers Organics order and I wanted to make sure it didn’t go to waste. This pesto pasta salad is green and makes me think of summertime. It’s creamy, filling, and very garlicky, so don’t make it when you’re trying to get close to someone new (major garlic breath alert). I brought some of the pasta salad to friends afterwards and got rave reviews from them as well, so the rehabbed recipe seems like a winner!
Ingredients
Pesto
- 5 cups basil
- 1/4 cup walnuts
- 1/4 cup pine nuts
- 9 cloves chopped garlic
- salt & pepper
- 1 cup olive oil (original recipe calls for 1 1/2 cups, but I didn’t need that much)
- 1/2 container vegan parmesan (I used Go Veggie – the original recipe called for 1 cup of grated parmesan)
Pasta Salad
- 3/4 pound each fusilli & bow tie pastas
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- Pesto
- Frozen or fresh chopped spinach (the original recipe calls for 10 oz. frozen but I don’t see why you can’t use a few cups of fresh as well)
- 3 tbsp. lemon juice
- 1 1/4 cup Vegenaise (the original recipe calls for mayonnaise)
- More vegan parmesan if you want – I didn’t add any more to this
- 1 1/2 cups defrosted frozen peas
- 1/3 cup pine nuts
- salt & pepper
Directions
Follow the directions on the Food Network website and use the substitutions I mentioned above. I will say, yield and servings are extremely misleading. The yield for the recipe says 4 cups, while the recipe says it makes 12 servings. I would say this recipe made somewhere between 12-16 cups of pasta salad with all the amounts listed. It’s very filling, so I would put the servings possibly over 12, especially if you were planning on eating this for lunch or as a side dish.
