Happy fall everyone! The weather is still pretty nice where I live but I’m sad that days are getting shorter. I am very much looking forward to fall weather though and eating lots of soups and squash. Also, I am moving along with this cookbook and am already on recipe 7!

The first recipe of the week was this pasta salad. I am not a fan of arugula so I decided to use baby spinach instead, which I just roughly chopped. But if you like arugula, you will love this salad because it calls for quite a large amount. Anyways, so my salad had lots of spinach, along with the cherry tomatoes, kalamata olives and the creamy “dressing”. It was a very colourful but healthy salad, that was perfect for a light dinner.

If you don’t know this recipe, this pasta salad doesn’t have a conventional dressing that you make and toss with everything. This “dressing” sort of just happens, as weird as that sounds. Let me explain..

You toss the warm pasta with the goat cheese (I subbed half the goat cheese for ricotta), as well as some olive oil and lemon juice and seasoning. As you mix, the cheese “melts” and becomes this creamy sauce. You also add warm pasta water to help make it even creamier. The result was this super rich – but not heavy – pasta salad.

Let me tell you, this salad was delicious. It was so creamy and not too tangy because of my half ricotta substitution. There was also a really nice balance of acid from the lemon and heat from the black pepper and chili flakes. Plus, the olives gave nice bits of salt throughout.

If this recipe sounded really good to you, I definitely recommend making it for lunch or dinner tonight. If you want another creamy recipe, you should make the crostini from recipe #6 (link here). It also calls for goat cheese but I used ricotta cheese in its place too.