I paid a visit to my local hippie-dippy market last weekend, and couldn’t resist gawking at their deli counter. It’s filled with so many healthy things, just one setback: all ridiculously expensive. Like, $8 for a mouthful. I caved and ordered the world’s smallest container of pasta salad, then reverse engineered the recipe at home. I used leftover roasted chicken meat from the previous night, and made enough salad for 6 large servings. It would’ve cost me more than $50 to buy the same amount at the market, and the original didn’t even have chicken…!
First of all, the yogurt-mango sauce. I like to use yogurt in dressings and sauces, but it never occurred to me to mix in mango purée. Add some curry powder, and the result adds something new and exotic to a plain ‘ol pasta salad. Could I do the same with pineapple, or papaya, in the future? The raw shredded carrots are a great idea, too — and if you can see in the corner of the picture above, I re-used the deli container to store an extra batch to use on something else later.
I love making stuff at home because I can be generous with ingredients, so the vegetable servings here are three times the size of the market-bought salad that inspired my recipe. I sautéed chopped zucchini, red peppers and added a sprinkle of dried cranberries to the pasta.
Since the pasta salad can be eaten cold, it makes a nice take to work lunch.
Did you like the recipe idea? Pls comment and share, it’s much appreciated!
Chicken Pasta Salad with Yogurt-Mango Sauce
Ingredients
- Sauce
- 1 cup plain greek yogurt fat free, or 2%
- 1 cup mango purée
- 1½ tsp curry powder
- 1 tsp turmeric
- Salad
- 300 g rotini pasta roughly ¾ lbs
- 1 tbs olive oil
- 1 zucchini cubed
- 1 red pepper chopped
- 1 medium carrot shredded
- handful of dried cranberries
- 1½ cup shredded rotisserie or leftover roasted chicken meat
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Cook the pasta until al-dente, drain and pour into a large salad bowl.
- Use a spoon to mix the yogurt, mango purée, the curry powder and turmeric. Note: if you’re making the mango purée from scratch, don’t purée the yogurt and mango together to save time. It will make the yogurt runny. Have your purée ready, and simply mix with remaining sauce ingredients by hand.
- Heat the olive oil in a skillet over medium heat. Sauté the zucchini and red peppers until softened. Remove from heat and set aside.
- Mix all of the salad ingredients together and season with salt and pepper. Serve very lightly warmed, or cold.
