Best Picnic Recipes
Food that travels well — Caesar pasta salad, deviled eggs, classic potato salad, dill pickle coleslaw — for park days, ball games, and potlucks all summer.
★ lunch
lunchCaesar Pasta Salad 🥗
I’m not a big fan of pasta salad on its own, but my husband loves pasta salad! What a better way to have the best of both the salad and pasta salad world and combine the two!
EmilyIngredients
- SALAD INGREDIENTS
- 2 heads Romaine lettuce
- 1-2 Cups Baby spinach
- 1 box Bow tie pasta
- 8oz Shredded Parmesan Cheese
- 1-2 cups Croutons
- As needed Caesar Dressing -homemade or store bought
- DRESSING INGREDIENTS
- 1/2 cup Mayonnaise
- 1/2 cup Sour cream (Or Plain Greek Yogurt)
- 2-3 tbsp Lemon Juice
- 2 tbsp Worcestershire Sauce
- To taste Salt
- To taste Pepper
- 2-3 Garlic Cloves
Instructions
- 1Start to boil water to cook your bow tie pasta.
- 2If you are planning to serve right away, next make your Caesar dressing by combining the ingredients above. Finely chop your garlic cloves, but you can also substitute with garlic powder. Set aside in the refrigerator.
- 3While your pasta is cooking, roughly chop your romaine lettuce and baby spinach.
- 4After your pasta is cooked, make sure to let the pasta cook for several minutes before combining ingredients.
- 5Next combine your Parmesan cheese, lettuces, and pasta.
- 6Next stir in your Caesar dressing and croutons. If you don’t plan to serve immediately wait to add your croutons and dressing right before serving to avoid your croutons getting soggy.
- 7Enjoy!
P.S. We update the recipes on this page every few days. If you want to cook this recipe over and over again, we'd love it if you downloaded Pepper 🤝.
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Open in Pepper →The Food That Rides In The Cooler
Picnic food has one job: taste just as good an hour after you packed it. That means the sturdy stuff — pasta salads, cold eggs, slaws that get better while they sit in the dressing.
Cooks on Pepper reach for this collection when there's a park day, a ball game, or a potluck sign-up sheet going around, and they need one dish that feeds a crowd out of a single bowl.
Every recipe here is built to travel: Caesar Pasta Salad, plain Deviled Eggs and Cajun Shrimp Deviled Eggs, Healthy Chicken Pesto Pasta Salad, Classic Potato Salad, and slaws in every direction — dill pickle, apple, Caribbean, and Zesty Mexican Street Corn Coleslaw.
Quick Tips
- 1
Chill the pasta first
Rinse cooked pasta under cold water and let it drain 5 minutes before dressing, or it soaks up everything and turns dry.
- 2
Salt the cabbage
Toss shredded cabbage with a teaspoon of salt, let it sit 20 minutes, then squeeze it dry so your slaw doesn't turn watery in the cooler.
- 3
Pipe the egg filling
Spoon the yolk mixture into a zip-top bag, snip off a corner, and fill 12 halves in about a minute with no mess.
- 4
Pack it over ice
Anything with mayonnaise should sit directly on ice packs, not beside them, and go back in the cooler within 2 hours.
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