This Mexican Pasta Salad with Lime Vinaigrette Dressing is loaded with corn, sweet capsicums, salty olives, fresh coriander, black beans and crunchy shallots, a favourite recipes in our household for sure.
A word of warning, this recipe makes a generous family sized bowl of veggie goodness with that lime Mexican flavour. The Lime Vinaigrette Dressing gives it a lovely zingy tang and just the right amount of sweetness. This recipe goes well with barbequed chicken kebabs beautifully.
What Ingredients are best for Mexican Pasta Salads?
This is one of those salads where you can kind of swap and change a few of the ingredients to suit your own family’s tastes. Most of the ingredients for this salad you’ll more than likely have on hand at home in your pantry and fridge.
The basic ingredients for this Mexican Pasta Salad with Lime Vinaigrette Dressing are:
- Pasta – packaged pasta makes this recipe really quick and easy. We used small spirals and they only took 8 minutes to cook.
- Corn – canned is perfectly fine and usually sweet too. If you rather you can pre cook normal corn, remove the kernels and use those as well.
- Black beans – easy to use the canned variety as you just whip open the tin, drain and add.
- Capsicum – crisp, sweet and colourful adds that perfect crunch.
- Onion or Shallots – red onions are a lovely colour and zing. While shallots make for a lovely fresh crunch and add that gorgeous green.
- Cherry Tomatoes – can’t resist these babies. Half or even quarter them.
- Olives – we love Kalamata olives. Throw in whole or chop them up. They add a load of saltiness so no need to add too much salt.
- Coriander – fresh is a must and you can never go past this perfect green herb.
The addition of the black beans gives great nutritional value and also are super high in fibre. These little beans are humble but amazing. For the full Health benefits and facts about black beans you can check out this great article by Eating Well.
Lime Vinaigrette Dressing Ingredients
- Olive Oil – a lighter olive oil is nice for this dressing. Not too strong
- Lime Juice = freshly squeezed is the best. Yum
- Honey – needs some sweetening and adjust to your taste buds. We like it on the slightly sweeter side
- Cumin – that fave ingredient that goes in most things
- Sweet Paprika – adds colour and flavour
- Garlic – this is optional. If you really love it then add two cloves.
Because we love fresh coriander we finely chopped the stems and added them to the dressing as well.
How To Mix Your Lime Vinaigrette Dressing
The easiest way to combine wet and dry salad ingredients is by popping them all into a jar and giving it a good shake. We usually use a jam jar for this kind of thing and generally grab a slightly larger one to give the ingredients room to combine. (remember to have the lid on tight!).
Watch the Mexican Pasta Salad With Lime Vinaigrette Dressing Video
Mexican Pasta Salad with Lime Vinaigrette Dressing Recipe
Large family sized salad that's so colourful, tasty and simple to make.
- 250 gm dried pasta spirals About 3 cups
- 1 can corn kernels drained 420 gm
- 1 can black beans drained 420 gm
- 1 cup Kalamata olives pitted sliced if you prefer
- 1 red capsicum chopped
- 1 yellow capsicum chopped
- 1 red onion finely diced
- 1 green shallot
- 300 gm cherry tomato's halved 300 gms
- 1/2 cup fresh chopped coriander leaves or Cilantro for our US friends
- 1/2 cup light olive oil
- 1/3 cup fresh lime juice
- 2 tabs honey adjust to your taste if needed *note
- 1/2 tsp cumin
- 1/2 tsp sweet paprika
- 1 clove garlic crushed optional
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Boil the pasta according to packet directions. Drain and rinse with cold water and add to a largish salad bowl.
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Add ;the drained corn kernels and black beans, olives, chopped capsicums, halved cherry tomatoes, finely chopped red onion and shallot and finally the coriander (cilantro). Mix all the ingredients together.
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Place all the salad dressing ingredients into an empty jam jar and shake till combined. Adjust to your taste.
- We do love a salad dressing on the sweeter side but adjust the honey to your own taste.
How To Store Your Mexican Pasta Salad and Lime Vinaigrette Dressing
Keep it in the fridge in an airtight container. If you are using this as a meal prep recipe you may want to store the dressing in a jar separately. After the salad has been dressed with the Lime Vinaigrette, it may tend to be absorbed by the ingredients and may lessen the flavor a little.
Surprisingly the salad doesn’t get too soggy after applying the Lime Vinaigrette when stored in the fridge.
To make this salad Vegan, substitute the honey in the vinaigrette dressing ingredients for a sweetener of your choice.
Other Salads You Might Like
You might also like 2 of our other salad recipes – Roasted Pumpkin Rocket and Feta Salad and our Cauliflower Rice Salad with Turmeric Vinaigrette Dressing.
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