Orzo salad

Although summer hasn’t shown her face this year, this salad brings me as close as possible to that summer feeling. I’ve heard about orzo pasta, but never found it in the store, until now.

I grew up with rice and noodles so I can’t wrap my mind around rice shaped pasta. Pasta should have all kinds of shapes, but why make them look like rice? I am so use to rice it was quite weird to cook with this pasta. It’s probably something that’s between my ears. It will go away…eventually…

Ok the ingredients I used in this salad are: cherry tomatoes, arugula, prosciutto, orzo pasta, onion and garlic. And last minute I decided to add some black olives and balsamic vinegar as well, so that’s not in the picture.

First I started with cooking the orzo in boiling salted water till they were done. I am very bad with measurements; that’s why I always end up with lots of food. I think for this salad I used about 300 grams of orzo.

While the pasta was cooking I chopped up one onion, grated about 3 gloves of garlic, quartered the tomatoes and pitted and sliced the olives. I drizzled some balsamic vinegar to give it more flavor.

I used the flat side of my knife to flatten the olive so I could easily pull out the seed. Who needs an olive pitter if you can do it like this.

The pasta was still a bit warm when I mixed it with the rest of the ingredients. 

Right before serving I tore the prosciutto in small bits and mixed in the arugula. Then I added some salt and pepper and it was ready.

And to make it even extra special…I added some toast pine seeds and one soft boil egg on top. I was too lazy to make poached egg and soft boil did the trick for me.

I'm saying bye to the summer, but not to this salad!