From My Kitchen

I’ve made variations of this dish sooooo many times, normally when digging around in the freezer looking for inspiration for dinner (dinspiration?) and discovering a packet of sausagemeat that wasn’t used at Christmas, or just a packet of sausages. It turns out that what I’ve been making is a sausage ragù, and rustling this up makes me feel like an Italian Mamma feeding her hungry family, which in our case means the three of us plus bonus leftovers as it will easily serve 4. Not too shabby.

Ingredients

1 tbsp olive oil

1 onion, finely chopped

2 cloves of garlic, crushed

450g sausagemeat/sausages

250g courgettes, small dice

2 chicken stock cubes

3 heaped tbsp tomato puree

10g sage leaves, finely chopped

200ml milk

Pasta of choice, I used 500g fresh pappardelle

Method

1. If using sausages, snip and peel off the skins and put the resulting sausagemeat to one side.
2. In a large frying pan, heat the olive oil with the onion and fry for at least 5 minutes until it softens, then add in the garlic for another minute or so (don’t let it brown).
3. Throw in your sausagemeat of whichever variety you are using and use a firm spatula or wooden spoon to roughly chop it up, and let it brown – no uniformity is needed here, you’re aiming for small pieces.
4. Fling in the chopped courgette too and let the whole lot sizzle away for a couple of minutes.
5. If you’re using dried pasta, now’s the time to get it bubbling away in a large pan of boiling salted water.
6. Crumble in the stock cubes, tomato puree, sage, black pepper, and milk, mix the whole lot together and let it bubble away for 5 minutes.
7. Check the seasoning and adjust if needs be. Add in some chilli flakes if that floats your boat.
8. If using fresh pasta, pop it on to boil now, then drain what ever kind of pasta you’re using when it’s cooked.
9. Serve, with some grated parmesan, which clearly I forgot this time around. Oops!