Chicken Bacon Ranch Pasta Salad {Portion Fix/21 Day Fix}

Pasta salads are a staple around my house in the summer. They are so ingredient versatile that I can make one every week this summer and never have the same one twice! I made one of my Chicken Bacon Ranch Pizzas the other day and thought I would try a Chicken Bacon Ranch Pasta Salad with the leftovers. **Pizza recipe below.

 

What ingredients go into this pasta salad?

Going thru the name of the recipe pretty much describes all of the ingredients… chicken, bacon, ranch, pasta are at the top of the list! 

The chicken …

So I will start with the chicken. My pizza was made with some leftover rotisserie chicken so I decided to make this salad with one too. One of the reasons is to keep the “cooking” part down to a minimum in the summer heat. The ones we like best are from our local grocery store and are very small. I can get 5-6 Red containers of meat off of the entire thing. Make sure to stip the skin off of the whole thing. When I am going to use the chicken meat cold, like for this salad, I buy it one day and just refrigerate it till the next day. They can be high in sodium so I just don’t salt my salad until I taste it and then add some if needed.

and the bacon! 

I don’t care for whole slices of turkey bacon. So when I cook turkey bacon I just cook the entire package and turn it all into bacon bits. I have found scissors are the best tool for that job, it goes faster with them. My favorite one has 8 slices per package so I seperate it into

 

The ranch dressing

I use my mayonnaise-based ranch dressing with some greek yogurt and a few extra spices added to it. The dressing recipe is HERE. But to make this even easier to make you can totally use your favorite bottle of approved ranch dressing. I have some suggestions for that HERE. 

 

The rest of the ingredients for Chicken Bacon Ranch Pasta Salad

I had this gluten-free penne in my pantry so I used them but any whole grain pasta would work also. You could also change up the shape of the pasta either rotini or shells would certainly work. One cup of veggies helps to fill out the portion size! I use 1/4 cup of onion and 3/4 cup cucumber but you could adjust that to any amount you prefer. 

You could add more veggies but then you would have to add more dressing to the mix. That is totally an option because for the serving size you only use 1/2 an Orange container. Broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, or celery would all be great add-ins. I would use 1 Orange container of ranch and 1 tablespoon of yogurt for each 1 cup of veggies used. Just make sure to adjust your container counts for anything you add!

What do I serve with Chicken Bacon Ranch Pasta Salad?

I love to serve pasta salad with grilled foods. Not heating the house up for side dishes on grilling night just makes sense! For burger night I can have my 1Y bun and 1/2Y of pasta salad on the same plate!

Also, I like little cheese cubes in this salad but I don’t care to mix them into it until time to eat. I added it to the top of my serving most of the time so that I don’t have to use any of my Blue container when I eat it again. If I were making this to take to a party and wanted to add cheese to the whole bowl, I would add 1 cup of cubes in at the very last moment and count 1/2 Blue container per serving. The serving size won’t change very much because the cheese will compress when it is measured.

It would go so good with these Grilled Lemon-Herb Pork Chop. Recipe HERE.

This Honey Mustard Salmon would great with it too!! Recipe HERE.

***I mentioned my Chicken Bacon Ranch Pizza above. The recipe can be found HERE.