Kid-Friendly Pasta Salad

Summer is slowly approaching us! I’m half excited, half dreading it. Although the heat can be unbearable at times, all of the activities & FOOD associated with summer make it so worth it! Lately I have been trying to think of some new foods to make my littles. Sometimes chicken nuggets & mac n cheese just don’t cut it anymore! So I sat down & started to brainstorm some new recipes my kids would love! This pasta salad is so perfect for them & crazy healthy. I love it because it has so many ingredients, but they compliment each other nicely! I really like it because I can make a ton of it & serve it to them all week. It’s a refreshing meal that’s perfect for summer & SUPER easy to make, y’all!

Here’s what you’ll need:

1 16 oz box/bag of organic pasta

1/4 cup sweet peas

1/4 cup diced carrots, raw

1/3 cup cherry tomatoes

Half of a cucumber, diced

1/3 cup mozzarella cheese

1/4 cup diced sweet ham

1/4 diced pepperoni

1 whole avocado, diced

1/2 cup lite honey mustard dressing

I know, A LOT of ingredients. But the great part about this recipe is that the only thing that needs to be cooked is the pasta & peas (if you got frozen like me)! Everything just needs to be diced & thrown in the bowl.

First I want to start off with a tiny yet funny story about one of my ingredients. Either I was really running on “mommy brain” at the grocery store, or the produce guy mixed up the vegetables, but I totally grabbed a zucchini, not a cucumber. And I didn’t even realize it until I started cutting it up to put in the salad! So, sad to say, the cucumbers were not in this batch of pasta salad. But it was still delicious!

Anywho, so first you will want to cook up your noodles as it’s stated on the box/bag. I bought some fun organic pasta from target. I thought the shape was cool & the colorful nature of them is awesome for kiddos!

Once your pasta is cooked, drain them & set them aside so they can start to cool a bit.

While it’s cooling, get to dicing! You’ll want to dice up everything! I went to my deli & got the ham and pepperoni sliced super thick. I only got one big slice of ham & a couple slices of pepperoni. You really don’t need much & the fresh deli meat is so much better than the other stuff! So dice up your meats, tomatoes, cheese, avocado, carrot, & cucumber if you didn’t mess that up like I did 😉

What’s also really great about this recipe is that you can make each ingredient as big or small as you like. It’s great for kids just starting to eat table foods all the way up to adulthood. Not gonna lie, I can kill a bowl of this stuff!

I went ahead & got a bag of frozen peas. I steamed the entire bag and just saved the portion I didn’t use for the pasta for dinner later this week 🙂 Throw everything in your mixing bowl & top it all off with your dressing!