Seafood Pasta Salad

Seafood Pasta Salad is one of the best pasta salad recipes for summer. Loaded with flavor from the pasta, shrimp, crab meat, celery, and onion. All coated with a simple dressing made from mayo and ranch salad dressing. This is the perfect summer salad recipe.

Next, to my Potato, Macaroni, and  Taco Salad, this Salad is a favorite of my family and I'm sure it will be a favorite of your family.

My husband's family would get together for many holidays throughout the year, which meant potlucks. One of his sisters would bring this seafood salad and it was one of the first dishes to be gone, everyone loved it.

It's been a long time since we have had his sister's seafood salad, so I decided to give it a try. This is my version of hubby's sister's seafood pasta salad I think you will enjoy this recipe.

How To Make Seafood Pasta Salad

In order to call this salad seafood, you will need some seafood so why not start with crab. I used the imitation crab for this salad, I think it holds up better than the real crab meat.

But by all means, if you would like to try real crab meat I'm sure it would taste even better. You may also want to try our crab stuffed mushrooms if you like real crab meat.

For the shrimp I used cooked salad shrimp, it was an 8-ounce package that said 100-200 shrimp inside. I found this to be a good amount for this salad.

I started making this salad by chopping the imitation crab up into chunks. Even though the shrimp is small I still chopped them up a bit also. You will want to make sure everything is bite-sized that way you can get a little of everything in a bite.

While I'm getting everything ready for the salad I had the radiatore noodles cooking on the stove according to the directions on the box. If you can't find raiatore noodles then rotini noodles will work.

I add a little olive oil to the pasta so the noodles wouldn't stick together however you could add butter as well. Along with cutting up the crab and shrimp I also cut up celery, onion, and fresh parsley to go into this pasta salad.

When the pasta is all done cooking, drain all the water off. Having the noodles in the colander is the perfect time to run cold water over the noodles to help cool them down some.

Making The Dressing

Now, this is the part of the seafood salad that I'm not sure if it's the same as hubby's sister's or not, but I really like the flavor of this dressing.

In a small bowl,  I mixed together with the mayo and ranch dressing with a little sugar. Make sure that the sugar is dissolved completly.

For the mayo, I did use real mayo and not miracle whip. If you use miracle whip you might want to add more sugar to help tame down the miracle whip some.

With the dressing made, the pasta cooked, and all the goodies cut up. It's time to mix everything together in a large bowl, mixing until all ingredients are coated with this delicious dressing. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Once all the ingredients are mixed together cover your bowl and refrigerate the salad until you are ready to serve it. This salad goes great with my Sloppy Joes or a good hamburger.

This Seafood pasta salad is a great potluck recipe or for a long weekend at home. I like to make this recipe during the summer for long holiday weekends.

Having a large bowl of it in the fridge takes the guesswork out of what to have with what we will be grilling.

Hope you enjoy this Seafood Pasta Salad as much as we do.

My Creative Manner is answering the question "what's there to eat" with simple recipe creations~ Jen

Other recipes from My Creative Manner that you may enjoy are:

• Instant Pot Whole Chicken
• Homestyle Baked Beans
• Instant Pot Beef Stew
• Famous Bowls
• Italian Pasta Salad
• Classic Spaghettti With Meat Sauce
• Chicken Feta Pasta

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