Best Sausage Arugula Shell Pasta
After a whole week of recovering from my arm surgery, I took baby steps easing myself back into simple tasks, such as opening tea bags and folding laundry. Today, I attempted making a simple yet hearty meal for lunch, also testing recipes for when my babies return. I haven’t seen them for a long time, miss them so very much.
I have to say, this meal is the highlight of my past few days, and I was super excited, and of course, I over ate for lunch, again.
Did I mention this is super easy, one pot healthy, tasty and kid friendly meal? Here is how I made it. My apologies first, my left hand / arm still have very limited mobility, so I was nowhere near as fast or detail oriented as I would like to be, so I took the shortcuts where I could and did not take any pictures till the very end.
Ingredients:
1/2 large onion, or 1 small one, diced. The half onion left in the fridge since who knows when has been bugging me royally, so of course I seized the first available opportunity to use it. It took me a while to dice it carefully, simply because I don’t have the firm grip from my left hand yet, so, slowly and carefully, I tackled the onion.
2 cloves of garlic, minced. You guessed it, I didn’t bother mincing garlic, I used about 1 tsp of garlic powder.
8 oz bulk sweet Italian sausage, or 2 links of Italian sweet sausage, casing removed.
About 4 cups of stock, as usual, I swapped with water and bouillon combo. I used 1 chicken cube and 1 beef cube to test the flavor, it worked beautifully.
8 oz of baby arugula, I bought a bag of baby arugula salad, which came with a bag of surprised corn kernels, of course I threw that in the pasta
1 squash, it was also bugging me, sitting in the fridge for a while, withering away, I couldn’t stand wasting fresh vegetables..so I diced it up, quarter inch thick, half moon or quartered to achieve roughly same size. Of course, broccoli, zucchini, mushrooms, cabbage, eggplant, leeks…any vegetables would be fantastic option!
1 generous cup of dried small shell pasta. You can use any bite size pasta in your pantry. I would recommend something that has some curves, holes, ridges of some sort to grab on the delicious sauces and sausage meat in each bite, you would be pleasantly surprised how amazing this meal is.
Optional: shavings of Parmesan cheese.
Method:
I heated up about 1 tsp vegetable oil in a high sided pan. The reason is simple, I will be cooking the pasta in this pot, I want the least amount of liquid added possible to achieve maximum taste. Throw diced onions into the pot and soften for a couple of minutes. Then add fresh garlic, or garlic powder and cook for another 30 seconds or so.
Add sausages to onion mixture, use the spoon or spatula to break the sausages to smaller sizes, or to your liking. Lower the heat to medium, stir occasionally to brown the sausages well. The kitchen smells amazing at this point.
Once the sausages are browned, add the vegetables except for the arugula and half of the stock or water. I threw in the bouillon to let the cubes dissolve, raise the heat and bring the liquid to a boil. Dump in the pasta and stir.
Lower heat to medium, stir occasionally to cook pasta gently. Add more liquid as needed, keep stirring, don’t walk away. After about 15 minutes, try pasta for doneness and seasoning. Mine was awesome, you can tell the shells grew in sizes and appear to be soft. Seasoning was spot on! After all, the sausages and bouillon are both quite salty. That’s why I never added any salt, can it be any easier?
Once pasta is done, kill the heat and fold in the arugula. It will look overwhelmingly much, but arugula will wilt to almost nothing, but add this subtle peppery yet sweet flavor to this dish. To me it is a must have ingredient.
Dish up, top with parm and enjoy!
