Chicken Bacon Ranch Pasta Salad
Y'all! I tried this Chicken Bacon Ranch Pasta Salad recipe from I Am Homesteader a couple of months ago after we started to get stuck in a dinner rut. You see, my mom and I swap off cooking during the week. One of us will cook 3 or 4 days and then the next one will do the same. On occasion, we'll go out to eat but mostly, we eat at home.
I started Googling recipes when this one came up. It sounded good. It sounded easy, and I like easy. So, I headed to the grocery store to get the ingredients. Fast forward, this was a big hit and we had at least 2 or 3 meals from it. I posted a picture on Facebook and now we have guests coming this afternoon with a request for this pasta salad.
So, anyway, I've made a couple of changes to the original recipe but head over to Amanda's post to get the whole thing.
I added twice as many vegetables to this recipe but kept the same amount of pasta. Just because there's sour cream, mayonnaise, and milk doesn't mean that this needs to be high calorie. I did change the milk to 2% because that's what we had and I forgot to buy a pint of milk. Buy real chives. They are so tasty and dried won't give you the right flavor.
I got this really cool
hand food chopper thanks to the
Mississippi Qween on TikTok. Yep, TikTok made me buy it. It sure did make chopping these pungent red onions a million times easier. I hand-chopped the yellow bell pepper because it was just easy. I chose yellow over green because the green ones give us all indigestion.
Here's all my chopped ingredients, except the chicken and pasta. I, also used Hormel microwave bacon because ain't nobody got time to fry up bacon in a pan and get the grease all over the place. Just sayin'.
I did double the amount of chicken, so 6 cups of chicken is 2 rotisserie chickens from my store. I don't eat dark meat but I do add it to this salad because it adds additional flavor. You could save the carcasses for soup or stock but I don't have time for that at the moment. I know I could have frozen them. Next time.
Doesn't it look amazing all put together? Make this the day before. There is nothing better than when the flavors all come together. I made this the day before so that it would be really wonderful. Make sure that the chicken and pasta are cooled off so that they don't absorb all of the dressing. The first time that I made this, I actually put together more sour cream, mayo, and milk to give us a bit more moisture but that's because I didn't cool all the ingredients. I really hope that you love this as much as we do and it becomes a family favorite.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
