Orzo salads

A friend got me a subscription to Cooking Light magazine when I got married. This has been the source of many delicious new recipes for me, and I think two big winners are the big winners has been the Chicken-Orzo Salad with Goat Cheese and Sungold Tomato Salsa Cruda with Orzo

The chicken-orzo salad is a great main dish and the salsa cruda salad makes a phenomenal side dish for a cookout. I love that the grains and veggies are combined in both, and I especially love that both use fresh flavorful ingredients--like basil, oregano, and/or arugula to give the salad flavor without requiring much in terms of fat.
Tonight I wanted to make Chicken Breasts Stuffed with Garlic and Herbed Goat Cheese, a favorite in the house and I wanted a simple, summery, sidedish to go with it. I decided to combine the two orzo salad recipes to make a cold vegetable/starch side dish. I used 3/4cup of orzo, a pint of sungold tomatoes, chopped red onion, chopped red pepper, arugula, fresh basil and oregano, and the chicken-orzo salad dressing. No cheese, as the chicken had enough (and, uh, I may have spread extra garlic-goat cheese mixture on bread as a sorta-bruschetta). This was delicious. Somehow the sungold tomatoes really sang so much brighter in the red-wine vinegar dressing. It was amazing and I wanted to share.