Caprese Pasta Salad!

My wife enjoys pointing out and mocking a time in my life when i claimed to not be picky about food. This was, and remains to be, a huge lie. I have been getting much better though as evidenced by the recent realization that i don't actually hate balsamic vinegar or basil.

After a tasty appetizer-ized (totally a word) caprese salad on tiny toasts made by some friends of ours I decided to combine my love of pasta salad with my new not-hatred of balsamic and basil to create a caprese pasta salad. I think it turned out wonderfully. Do enjoy these pictures.

Here we see what those in the cooking industry, or those in the 'went to culinary school and now just watch a lot of food network' industry, might call mise-en-place. This is a fancy french term for 'get all your stuff together before you start.' The tiny mozzarella balls were surprisingly hard to find until I broke down and went to whole foods. Lesson learned.

I absolutely love bowtie pasta. I think in future pasta salads I will return to rotini or something similar, but bowties always make the food look that much more interesting to me. You'll never take my tiny little neckwear inspired pasta! Never!

A quick halving of the tiny mozzarella balls and similarly tiny tomatoes, and I mixed them with some chopped fresh basil. My only complaint with fresh herbs is that I can never seem to use them all up before some blight or disease or rot claims them. Guess that's an indictment of me, though. Robert Steele, Herb Murderer.

I think I went to highschool with Herb Murderer......

The finished product! I tossed together a balsamic vinaigrette with the oil and vinegar plus dijon mustard, a bit of garlic, lemon juice, salt, and pepper. Lightly dressed, the tiny ties are ready for their closeup. As we enjoyed, I noticed that occasionally the halved tomatoes and mozzarella balls would sometimes stick back together and form an almost perfect sphere. Those were the best bites.

Aside from having to run all over town to acquire the cheese, this was a relatively quick and easy meal to put together. We had a decent amount left over for cold midnight snacking and my wife and I both agreed that we would definitely be doing this one again.

-R