Shrimp & Corn Pasta Salad with Feta
Ingredients
for the salad:
- 1 stalk celery, with greens sliced
- 1 small red onion chopped
- 2 ears' corn worth of kernels
- 3 red radish halved and thinly sliced
- 1/4 loose cup lightly chopped Italian parsley
- 3-4 green onions chopped
- 1/4 cup sundried tomatoes chopped the dry kind in a packet, not the ones in oil or brine
- 1/4 cup banana pepper coarsely chopped
- 24 oz medium or large shrimp steamed, cooled, and peeled
- 16 oz rotini cooked according to package instructions, cooled and drained
- 7 oz drained weight feta in brine crumbled
for the dressing:
- 1/3 cup mayonnaise
- splash of brine from the banana peppers
- 2-3 tablespoons red wine vinegar
- salt
- freshly ground black pepper
- 1/2 teaspoon celery seed
- 1-2 teaspoons Greek or Italian seasoning I like the kind in the jar with the grinder
Instructions
- Toss together all the salad ingredients in a large bowl until evenly distributed. Set aside.
- In a small bowl, whisk together the dressing ingredients. Drizzle over the salad and stir it in until it is evenly distributed.
- Serve immediately or refrigerate for an hour or two first. Store leftovers in the fridge for up to 2 days.
It’s been a minute since I posted a shrimp and pasta salad recipe. They are something I enjoy eating but honestly, I don’t always love making them! They fall under the umbrella of simple but a little tedious for me. I like that you can make them ahead of time (and they often are even better if you do) but steaming the shrimp, peeling the shrimp, boiling the pasta, letting it all cool down, and chopping all that stuff up always takes way longer than I expected. I’ve been trying to get into audiobooks lately and I swear I blew through a whole section on regular speed making this.
The trick to a good pasta salad is small pasta, no too large protein (this is not the time to use jumbo shrimp) something pickled (banana peppers), something crunchy (celery, radish), something onion-y (red and spring onions), something salty (feta), something with a different texture than everything else (sundried tomatoes), and something very fresh (corn, parsley). I know mayonnaise can be polarizing but I don’t know a better way to evenly coat the salad. I feel like the leftovers are less soggy when you use it too.
