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Made on Sunday, this covers three lunchboxes and a couple of adult lunches. It is one of the few cold lunches that does not get worse over a few days — as long as you handle the dressing correctly.
Dress it twice
Pasta keeps absorbing dressing as it sits, so a salad that was perfect on Sunday is dry by Tuesday. Dress it lightly when you make it, keep the rest of the dressing in a jar, and add a spoonful to each portion as you pack it.
For a lunchbox specifically, the better move is to send the dressing in its own small pot — the same wet-away-from-dry principle from our school lunch guide. It also means one child can have it plain, which is often the difference between eaten and not.
Rinse the pasta, just this once
Normally rinsing pasta is a mistake because it washes off the starch that holds sauce. For a cold salad it is the right call: it stops the cooking immediately and prevents the pieces welding into a block. Rinse under cold water until properly cool, then drain very well.
Cook it a minute past al dente, too. Pasta firms up in the fridge, and properly al dente pasta eaten cold is unpleasantly hard.
Cutting for younger children
Cherry tomatoes and grapes are a choking hazard for children under about four and should be quartered lengthways, not halved crossways. Mozzarella pearls should be quartered as well. NHS and American Academy of Pediatrics choking guidance is the thing to follow here.
Keeping it cold
This contains cooked pasta and dairy, so it needs to stay chilled — two slim ice packs and an insulated bag, as set out in keeping a packed lunch cold. It keeps three to four days refrigerated.
