Cook This Easy Pasta Recipe Now to Have Healthy Lunches All Week Long

Pasta salad that can last you the whole week?! Yes, please. Find the full recipe here.  

Let's be honest: not all of us are meal preppers. Some of us would rather spend our Sundays doing...literally anything else than spending hours in the kitchen. But what if I told you that there was a recipe you could spend just 30 minutes making in order to set yourself up with at least four meals for the rest of the week? Chef Klancy Miller makes it possible on the latest episode of Well+Good's new series, Cook With Us.

Miller, who’s the author of Cooking Solo: The Fun of Cooking for Yourself, knows a thing or two about cooking up creative meals that go well beyond one serving. For this challenge—making a healthy pasta dish in under 30 minutes with lots of leftovers—she whips up a gluten-free pasta salad that’s sure to hold you over throughout the work week. “I love playing with vegetables,” she says. “And I like kale with pasta, so it’s going to be a kale pasta salad served hot.”

Miller combines cooked red lentil-quinoa pasta with lots of fixings: sautéed kale, red onion and tomato, toasted walnuts, zesty turmeric, and pomegranate seeds for an extra boost of antioxidants. “I sometimes think it’s nice to have a few different textures and even temperatures in any dish,” she says. “You always want to have different colors, different textures, something hot, something cold, something warm.”

She then brings that hot-and-cold ethos to the final dish. After you’ve finished eating your meal, just put your pasta salad in a Pyrex container with a few extra pomegranate seeds and tahini dressing to store in the fridge or bring with you on-the-go. When you’re ready for round two, don’t even worry about heating it up. “This is actually why I chose this recipe because it’s great hot and then you can have it cold the next day for lunch,” says Miller. You'll never have to agonize over what to make with leftover pasta ever again—because these leftovers are perfectly suited to be eaten as is.

Want healthy lunches all week long? Watch the whole episode of Cook With Us for the full recipe.

Quinoa noodles aren't the only gluten-free option you can use to make this tasty salad. Sub-in this tasty red-lentil penne, or skip the pasta all together and hop on the alt-rice trend.