Pasta salad with quail eggs
( Insalata di pasta con uova di quaglia )

Recipe for pasta salad with quail eggs

Preparation and cooking

• - Prepare quail eggs.
  Cook quail eggs in water, 4 minutes.
  Plug them into very cold water just cooked; this helps loosen their shell.
  Crack every egg around its center and, gently, roll it on a work surface until the eggshell is cracked all around the center.
  Peel the eggshell away from the white.
  Wash them under cold running water and dry gently before using if there are some shell pieces left.
  Halve 18 quail eggs, let the remaining ones whole and put apart.
• - Prepare pasta salad dressing.
  Put your halved quail eggs (the other ones will be used for decorating the dish) in a large bowl.
  Drain mushrooms and bell peppers from their preserving oil.
  Then halve mushrooms lengthways and cut bell peppers into thin strips.
  Place both in the bowl.
  Drain peas from the preserving liquid, rinse, drain again and transfer in the bowl.
  Add olive oil and chives too.
  Stir gently and put apart.
• - Prepare pasta salad.
  Meanwhile cook pasta al dente style, drain and run under cold water in order to stop cooking.
  Drain again and transfer pasta into the bowl.
  Stir gently.
  Season to taste with salt if necessary and stir gently again.
• - Chill until serving, at last 2 hours.

Just before serving

• - Bring back your cold pasta salad to room temperature before serving.
• - Just before serving halve remaining quail eggs and garnish the surface as you can see in the photo.

Note

Tips

• - You have the best result with good-quality ingredients.
  If the pasta is easy to overcook you'll never have a tasty pasta salad.
• - It's important to run pasta under cold water to stop cooking and remove the excess of starch.
  So your pasta will never be sticky.
• - You can prepare this dish some hours in advance and so you'll have more time for your party preparations.

Menu planning

• - Rememeber this is a vegetarian pasta salad you can combine with other vegetarian dishes or recipes based on meat or fish.
• - Obviously you can prepare this pasta salad for your family menu too. Read more below.

Useful links for this recipe

• - Consult our fish and meat directories to find other ideas for your menu.
• - Follow the link if you want to know more about Italian pasta and its nutrition value.

Healthy eating

• - Pasta salad is a dish rich in ingredients and so it is necessary to calculate the right amount of everything we use not to exceed calories, fat and sugars.
• - If you like this pasta salad and the combination of its ingredients and would like to prepare it for your dinner or lunch, use these amounts per head: 50g ( 1 3/4 ounces) short pasta, 3 quail eggs, a tablespoon of canned peas, a large strip of bell peppers, a tablespoon of mushrooms in oil (drain both the vegetables in oil very well), the amount you prefer of aromatic herbs, 2 teaspoons olive oil. You can have the same nutrition facts with these doses.
  Complete your lunch with raw or cooked vegetables seasoned with 2 teaspoons olive oil and finally fresh fruit. Don't add other food rich in protein. Proetin are already in quail eggs and peas.
  
• - As you can see it's a tomato-free recipe, ideal for people intolerant or alergic to tomatoes. In addition, it has no cheese and this is also something to be taken into account when preparing dishes for a lot of people, especially when you don't know your guests very well.
• - If you want to drink a glass of wine remember you have to add 80 to 90 calories per 100 ml.

Loretta

What's the right wine for " Pasta salad with quail eggs "?

My suggestion is to match Corvo rosa (rosé wine from Sicily - Italy) to this pasta salad. Serving temperature is 12 to 14°C.