Looking for an easy dinner that doesn’t heat up the kitchen? This easy taco pasta salad recipe makes a tasty one-dish meal that combines pasta, seasoned meat, fresh veggies and cheese into one hearty meal that’s perfect for busy summer nights, potlucks and quick family dinners.
This easy taco pasta salad recipe is one of my favorite summertime meals. When the weather gets hot, the last thing most of us want to do is spend hours cooking in the kitchen. It’s a nice change from hot meals, filling enough to serve as dinner all by itself, and made with simple ingredients you probably already have on hand.
This is one of those recipes that’s easy to adapt to whatever you have in the fridge. Have leftover taco meat from taco night? Toss it in. Have some rotisserie chicken that needs to be used up? That works too. You can add extra vegetables, use whatever cheese you have in the fridge, and adjust the dressing to suit your family’s tastes. It’s an easy way to turn odds and ends into a meal everyone will actually eat.
This taco pasta salad is perfect for busy weeknights because you can make it ahead of time and keep it chilling in the refrigerator until dinner. It’s also great for potlucks, picnics, church gatherings, and family reunions because it travels well and feeds a crowd without costing a fortune.
For this week’s meal plan, we’re keeping things simple. Serve the taco pasta salad with warm cornbread and a tray of carrot, celery, and bell pepper sticks for an easy, colorful meal. Then finish dinner with our creamy No-Bake Cheesecake Dip served with fresh fruit, cookies, or cake cubes for a dessert that feels special but takes just a few minutes to make.
If you’re looking for an easy dinner that doesn’t heat up the kitchen and helps stretch your grocery budget, this taco pasta salad recipe is a great one to add to your summer meal lineup.
Taco Pasta Salad Recipe Meal Plan:
Taco Pasta Salad
Cornbread
Carrot, celery, and bell pepper sticks
No-Bake Cheesecake Dip
For more quick and easy recipes, like this easy taco pasta salad recipe, to make easy dinners fast, check out our cookbooks!
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Easy Kitchen Tips:
- When making cornbread, I grease a cast iron skillet with bacon grease. Then, I heat it in an oven at 400° until it is really hot. It should sizzle when a couple of drops of water are dropped into it. Watch it carefully until it is ready. Then, I pour the cornbread batter into it, adjust the oven temperature to what is called for by the recipe directions and continue baking.
- Store cleaned celery upright in a wide glass or cup filled half full of water in the fridge until you are ready to use it. The Victorians made special vases for this very purpose. This is a good way to store other things like parsley or cleaned carrots.
- Cleaning the microwave. Sometimes we make things so much more difficult and expensive than they need to be. Here is an example:The actual tip says, “Heat water and vinegar to clean the microwave.”
But here’s the easy way: You don’t need to bother with the vinegar at all. It really doesn’t work any better than plain water. If you keep on top of cleaning your microwave, you can make it even easier by heating up a cup of water for tea. Then you can wipe the microwave just before you sit down and enjoy your tea. Keep it simple!
I’d like to do some kind of Mexican pasta dish, but baked in the oven. Maybe I will tweak this and come up with something.
Love your newsletter, hints, everything! One heads up, though, on today’s hint to keep celery in a cup of water in the refrigerator: the newer ‘frost free’ refrigerators will work overtime (=increased electrical costs) trying to remove any moisture/evaporation source so itt might be wise to make sure the container is covered. Thank you again, Jill and Tawra…I really appreciate your wise, frugal and fun approach to running a household.
When I am freezing small bags of ground beef (or whatever) I like to use inexpensive
sandwich zip bags—then put all of them in a quart or gallon size freezer bag. I think it protects
from freezer burn and odors even for short-term freezing, plus I can find them. Used
freezer bags (I wash mine until they spring holes) work great. I love your recipes and tips.
Tommie in Abilene
Re: Cleaning microwave. The way I clean mine is…I use the vinegar and water because it doesn’t streak the glass. ANother thing I do is I turn my micrwave upside down and wash the top of it as if it were the bottom. Then flip it back over and wash the bottom. Viola…no problem.
I have a tip for keeping celery crisp: Trim the root end just a little – not enough to separate the individual ribs, but to open up the end to pull water back up into the ribs. Take a sheet of aluminum foil (I use heavy duty) and stand the stalk in the middle. Bring up the ends of the foil to the sides of the stalk, then go back and bring up the shorter sides up to the stalk. Take your hands and form this ‘cup’ snugly around the whole stalk. Pour about a tablespoon down in to the bottom of the ‘cup’ and return to the original plastic bag in which it came. I take a bread tie and close up the top of the bag (there are holes in the bag itself to allow the celery to breath but that’s why it gets limp in the first place, especially in a frost-free refrigerator). If the stalk is limp to begin with, it will take a couple of days to rehydrate, but I have kept celery like this for up to 2 weeks. I also don’t separate each rib when I cam cutting the celery. I learned this from a cooking show on TV. Take the whole stalk and cut crosswise to obtain the necessary amount of celery you need. The stalk holds together and gives something to grip when cutting. You can cut thin or thick slices. It only takes about four cuts to get a cup of celery. Hope this helped some of you.
Oops! I meant to say “pour about a tablespoon of WATER” down inside the ‘cup’.