Mid-week Munchies

Sausage and noodles in a light tomato sauce.

By Mango

No, not those kind of munchies. Panda and I have been MIA for several months now. We have no excuse. We've been lazy. And we got married! But that was back in November. So really, we've been lazy. But here's a short post to get back into the swing of things - Sausage and Pasta. We try to always keep "emergency sausage" on hand - fresh, frozen, smoked, or cured. Whatever floats your boat. It's one of the easiest things to turn into a meal - casserole, soup, pasta sauce...the possibilities are almost endless.

This is a quick meal, typical of what we usually cook during the week. Although I made the pasta from scratch (Anne Burrell's pasta dough recipe is amazing), the sausage dish itself takes about 30 minutes to cook. The pasta also doesn't take too long - 15 minutes to prepare the dough, 30 minutes rest time before it can be rolled out and noodle-ified. Of course, fresh pasta isn't necessary. We use the ready-made stuff too.

I made noodles of a larger width, so they were more like ribbons. 

This is my pasta holding station. The melon is key. 

These are the ingredients for the sausage sauce (some of these aren't pictured. Because, as usual, I forgot):

- Sausage, sliced thick. We had 2 fresh Italian pork sausages.

- Sliced onion (one half of a very large onion).

- 1 tomato, sliced.

- 1 large garlic clove, chopped.

- 1 tablespoon tomato paste.

- Half of a chicken bouillon cube, crumbled.

- Quarter cup white wine. I used pinot grigio.

- 1 tsp each of dried thyme, dried basil, herbes de provences.

- 1 1/2 tsp non-smokey paprika. I used Hungarian paprika.

- 1/2 to 1 tsp dried chili flakes (adjust to your spice level preference).

- 1 cup water.

- Salt and pepper to taste.

See how that reads sage? Yeah. I didn't use sage.
I used basil. I'm horrible at photo-documenting ingredients.  

First, brown the sausage in some olive oil on medium-high heat. Season with salt and pepper.

Remove the sausage. Add the onions to the pan first, season with salt and pepper, and stir fry until it starts to brown. Add the garlic, herbs, paprika, bouillon bits, chili flakes. Stir fry for a minute, then add the white wine and once it cooks off, add the tomatoes and tomato paste. Add the sausages back to the pot and stir fry for an additional 5 minutes or so. 

Add 1 cup of water, season with salt and pepper to taste,
and let the sauce reduce on a medium-high flame.

Once you're able to swipe a 'trail' through the sauce, it has thickened enough. In the mean time, cook the pasta until it's almost done.

Toss the noodles with the sausage sauce,
along with a quarter cup of pasta water (the water leftover from cooking the noodles). Panda says this helps the sauce to better coat to the noodles.

And there you have it. Sausage with noodles. We had this with a side of steamed broccoli.

Panda (walking to the kitchen after he's done eating): "You made it too good. Now I have to go and get more."