Roasted Vegetable Pasta Salad

If you haven't guessed by now, I am a huge fan of anything with roasted veggies, so I jumped at the chance to make the Roasted Vegetable Pasta salad from the newest edition of Clean Eating Magazine.  (It's on Page 48 if you're a subscriber).

For those of you who aren't familiar with the magazine, it's chock full of recipes that eschew refined carbohydrates, added sugars, high amounts of saturated fats and processed foods containing lots of additives and preservatives.  Each issue comes with a food budget planner and a monthly meal plan.  While not all the recipes are veg, they're full of fresh fruits and vegetables, and it's often easy to sub or modify to make the dishes veg friendly.

This recipe calls for roasted peppers, onions, tomatoes and zucchini, and a vinaigrette chock full of garlic and fresh herbs.  It also calls for goat cheese, but it can be made vegan by omitting the cheese. I thought it would be perfect to take to tomorrow's Fourth of July BBQ. 

I did make some subs to this recipe for a variety of reasons.  First, as much as I love eggplant, we're taking this to a party at my brother & sister-in-law's house, and as she is allergic to eggplant, I omitted it from the recipe.  To make up for it, I added some navy beans and an orange pepper in addition to the red, yellow and green.  Second, although I was dying to try kamut pasta, it wasn't available at Balducci's (and their whole grain pasta offerings were scant, in my opinion).  Since we had enough errands to run yesterday without another stop, I ended up going with some nicer traditional macaroni. 

Another sub I made was the verjus, which is made from the juice of unripe grapes. They did have that at Balducci's, but only in a large-ish bottle.  A quick google search revealed that red wine vinegar was an okay sub, so I used that and fresh lemon juice.   And, finally, I doubled the whole recipe, which serves eight as it's written in the magazine.

My mother always told me that pasta salad tastes better the second day, so the whole thing is marinating as we speak.  I'll bring the goat cheese along and plan to toss it in right before we serve it.  We'll see how it tastes tomorrow!