BLT Pasta Salad

This Easy BLT Pasta Salad Recipe will be the side dish star of your BBQ or potluck! Everyone will be asking for the recipe of this yummy bacon filled salad!

This BLT Pasta Salad caused a miracle to occur in our home. My daughter has a serious aversion to creamy foods. No macaroni and cheese or mashed potatoes for her. She is a great eater, but is just disgusted by anything creamy, so when I served this BLT Pasta Salad for dinner one night, I knew I was in trouble. Well…I was wrong. She not only happily ate this pasta salad off her plate, but she asked for seconds. And THEN asked for me to put this salad in her lunch box for camp the next day!

And it wasn’t only the five year old who loved this pasta salad recipe, we all were in love with the creamy ranch dressing, crispy bacon, and freshness of the tomatoes and spinach! If you have lots of garden tomatoes, this is the perfect way to use them! No cooking required!

Labor Day is so bittersweet. It is such a nice long weekend, and in our area, we have lots of festivals and fun things to do, but it also symbolizes the end of summer. Here in PA, we are already experiencing fall like weather, so summer is definitely gone. Everyone is back to school and we are all settling into routines, but I definitely miss the lazy days of summer already. This BLT Pasta Salad is going with us to our Labor Day picnic though, so that’s a bright spot 🙂

Are you spending the weekend with friends and family? Maybe jetting off to the beach to squeeze out a little more summer? Either way, add this BLT Pasta Salad to your Labor Day Menu and you will have lots of happy guests!

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BLT Pasta Salad

Ingredients

• 12 oz. farfalle pasta noodles
• 10 slices of bacon cooked crisp and then broken into pieces
• 1 pint cherry tomatoes quartered
• 2 cups of baby spinach
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1/4 tsp. pepper
• For the dressing:
• 2/3 cup ranch dressing
• 1 heaping tbsp. mayonnaise
• 2 tsp. dijon mustard
• 2 tsp. Italian dressing

Instructions

1. Boil pasta according to instructions and drain well when finished.
2. While pasta cooks, add quartered tomatoes and cooked bacon to a mixing bowl.
3. In a small bowl, add all the dressing ingredients and whisk until combined.
4. Once pasta is finished, add it to the bowl of bacon and tomatoes. Stir well and then add half the dressing. Cover and chill for at least 1 hour.
5. One hour before serving, add the spinach and the remaining dressing. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Return to the fridge until ready to serve.