I do quite like pasta based salads which are basically can be best described as cold pasta! Though there is a little more work required than just letting cooked pasta going cold…
For this salad I cooked some fusilli pasta twists and after they had cooked, I immersed them in cold water. Iced cold water would be better, but I had no ice, so just plain cold water would do. This is for two reasons, firstly to make the pasta cold, ready for the salad, secondly to stop the cooking process. If you just cooked the pasta an let it go cold, it would go all soggy as it continued to cook after you drained it. So even if you intend to eat your pasta salad later, still plunge it into cold water to stop the cooking process. Just as an aside this is often how restaurants “cook” pasta. They cook the pasta until just about done, before plunging the pasta into ice cold water. They can then finish the cooking of the pasta when needed and it will only take a minute to finish the pasta before adding a sauce.
So with the cooked pasta I added a couple of spoonfuls of basil pesto and some chicken.
Mixed and served.
You could add some fresh basil leaves to up the basil flavour. Another option would be to add some cooked spinach.