Sausage and smashed pea pasta with cream sauce

This one is really, really simple.  I got the idea from a program that I saw on the Food Network, and thought this would be good to make some evening for us.  The ingredients are simple and generally easy to come by, and total prep time is all of about fifteen minutes.  Yes, that’s right, about fifteen minutes from walking in the door from the store to having dinner on the table.

Ingredients:

• 1 lb. wide pasta noodles (the program I saw used “tagliatelle,” as did I, but any pasta noodle would probably do as well, though I think that the wider noodle holds the sauce and stuff better). 
• 4 cloves of garlic, chopped.
• 1 lb. hot italian sausage (or, if you’re like me and don’t like fennel seeds, use regular loose sausage and add some red pepper flakes and chili powder while browning it).
• 1 cu. ricotta cheese.
• 1 lb. frozen peas, thawed (don’t use canned!).
• about a half cup of pecorino romano cheese, grated.
• a bunch of fresh basil, chopped.
• salt
• olive oil

This is really easy, and just about fail-proof:

1. Start the water for the pasta.  Salt it like one might normally do for pasta.  When it comes to a boil, add the pasta and cook normally.  This can all happen while you’re doing the next steps.
2. Put some olive oil in the bottom of a deep skillet or chicken fryer, get it hot, and add the chopped garlic.
3. After the garlic gets aromatic, put in the sausage to start it browning.
4. Once the sausage is browned, turn the heat off under the pan, drain the sausage somewhat, remove it from the pan and set it aside.  Don’t worry about any crumbs or stuck-on stuff in the pan–it is fine, and will add flavor to the later steps. 
5. Put the thawed peas in the pan, and use the back of a sturdy spoon to smash them.  I found that I had to cook mine in the ‘wave a bit before smashing them, as they weren’t quite ready to go after just defrosting them.
6. Put the ricotta cheese in the pan with the peas so that it can start to soften. 
7. Once the pasta is finished, remove it from the water with tongs (or, if you have a pasta pot with a basket, pull the basket from the water, but don’t rinse or fully drain the pasta), and dump it into the pan with the cheese and peas. 
8. Add the sausage back to the pan.
9. Begin to stir everything together.  This will take some time.  If things get a little thick and the ricotta isn’t melting nicely (this is almost sure to be the case), put a ladle of the pasta water over the pasta and mix some more.  Continue to add pasta water to the mix until the consistency is nice. 
10. Mix-in the chopped basil and romano cheese.

Guess what?  You’re done!  Serve it as-is, with some extra romano for those who want it a little more salty. 

To make this even better, follow the recommendation of the show and use a regular skillet instead of a non-stick.  This will result in some nice, crunchy brown sausage bits stuck to the pan, which will come off nicely when the pasta water is added, adding a little bit of extra flavor to the works.  I don’t have a non-stick skillet big enough, and forgot that I had a dutch oven that would have worked just as well for this.  Oops.  I used a non-stick skillet, and it worked fine, but I didn’t have any nice crunchy sausage bits. 

I also found that I immediately wanted more romano cheese in mine, so feel free to bump that number up a bit.  🙂 

jonathan