Recipe: Spicy Vegan Summer Pasta Salad
I recently met a fellow British Chinese food producer, Danni from Happy Eating House. She is the talented purveyor of small batch, artisanal authentic Oriental cooking sauces. Her products are 100% natural and contain no MSG or artificial preservatives. I love that her Hoisin Sauce uses prunes for sweetness! I picked up a few of her cooking sauces, including a couple of chilli oils, and on one unusually scorching summer evening I put them to good use.
I’m a fan of what I call ‘low intervention’ pasta salads — put together by simply tossing lightly cooked vegetables, raw if possible, with al dente pasta and held together with a pungent, oily, umami–laden sauce such as pesto or Balsamic oil dressing. So I thought, why not use the chilli oil instead?
It’s a marriage made in heaven; a meeting of East and West that traverses the Silk Road spectrum… and it’s the perfect 30–minute meal for a simple yet satisfying lunch or dinner.
Let me know if you try this recipe and share your results on Instagram with #CelestialPeach.
Ingredients
Any dry or fresh pasta that takes your fancy, enough for 2–4 people
Colourful salad vegetables such as cucumbers, radishes, bell peppers, heritage tomatoes, spring onions
1–2 tbsp Happy Eating House Chiu Chow chilli oil (or similar chilli oil)
Salt and black pepper to taste
Raw herbs, such as basil, coriander or mint (optional)
Instructions
Cook the pasta to instruction, and allow to cool.
Chop the raw salad vegetables into roughly the same bite–sized shapes.
Toss all the ingredients together with the chilli oil.
Season with salt, pepper and herbs to taste.
