One great summer salad I make is a simple Coronation Sauce Pasta Salad. This is a staple in my fridge in the summer as I often have a “Salad Buffet” stacked up in the fridge ready to dip into, so I can pick and mix different salad meals. I find these salad buffet boxes work well for summer food grazing.
There are many ways of making a coronation sauce, but an easy coronation sauce pasta I will quickly make up uses tiny seashell pasta, called conchigliette pasta, which is a great size for a pasta salad, but any pasta will do. The recipe below Serves One, but can easily be scaled up:
Ingredients:
- 60 grams Conchigliette Pasta per portion
- A big squirt of mayonnaise (or salad cream if I’ve no mayo)
- ½ teaspoon of curry powder (hot or mild, depending how you like it)
- ½ teaspoon of garam masala – or, if I’m out of that, just a bit more curry powder!
Method: 
- Cook the pasta, then strain it and cool it by running cold water through it for 30 seconds or so.
- Combine the mayonnaise with the curry powder and garam masala
- Add the pasta to the sauce and mix through.
- Chill before serving if you can – I find the flavours work best if it is left to “soak in” for awhile.
Once made, this coronation sauce pasta will live quite happily in a covered box in the fridge for 3-4 days! Any covered box will do, I have a range of simple takeaway boxes and lock n lock style boxes in lots of sizes.
For alternative coronation sauce recipes, see: Coronation Sauce
Menu Cost:
This, as usual, is a frugal recipe. The pasta costs about £0.10 and the mayonnaise and curry powder would add about another £0.05. So probably a total cost of £0.15 per portion! There’s enough to work as 3-4 portions, if a portion is a dollop of pasta salad. Portion sizes depend on how you’ll be eating something. If I just ate this, it’d be a portion 🙂 If I add 1/4 of this into a mixed salad bowl each 1/4 would still be a portion. Confusing, eh!