I love pasta salad. Really, I just love pasta.

I could never be gluten-free. It’s just not me. I’m not happy without some sort of pasta on a regular basis. I do admit pasta isn’t always the best food, but I fully believe in everything in moderation and in making things healthier as much as possible.

So one of my solutions is to add a ton of vitamins and fiber when possible. That’s how this salad came about. I do a summer camp most summers and I started making this during then; a time when I have a limited time to eat and need something to fuel me for the rest of the day with tiny children.

It is also one of the most ridiculously simple pasta salads in the world. It takes about five minutes longer than it does to cook pasta and it can easily stay in the fridge for a week. Because of that. I usually make a lot of it at once and keep it for a week of lunches.

It’s also so easy to modify. You can change the pasta shape, not cut the pepperoni slices like I did and use bocconcini or cilliegine mozzarella (the little balls) instead of the big ball of mozzarella like I did. In fact I usually use cilliegine mozzarella just to cut down on the amount of chopping I need to do, but I couldn’t find it in my store today so I went with the big ball. You could also bump up the fiber and protein count more by substituting a whole grain or fiber rich pasta.