Italian inspration

Hello lovelies,

Thank gosh Monday is over, it’s Tuesday now at least, which doesn’t seem much better in the daily grind, but at least it is marginally better than Monday! So after a wonderful weekend, my spirits were very high and motivation to cook something fantastic for dinner was sky high too. So last night I made a pasta from a few ideas I had seen in passing on my RSS feeds and through magazines articles. I had a few ideas that I wanted to mash together. One of which was using sausage mince as the meat in a pasta dish. This is done by taking the meat out of some gourmet sausages and frying that up into reasonably small freeform meatball sizes. Little morsels of seasons meat intrigued me because I love gourmet sausages and the pictures that I had seen always looks so decadent and truly italian (sucker for pictures!). To be honestly I loved the idea of making something that was a little complicated and that seemed more authentically Italian (unsure why). The other idea was a simple tomato sauce that I had tried many times before, but in this case, I went for the jar bolognaise sauce.

So off I started defrosting some Pork and Fennel sausages that I had bought with the intention to make something along these lines. Once defrosted, I cut the ends and removed the mince from inside the casings. This would have been a bit gross to an innocent bystander, but there were none of them so I just keep plodding along at it. I sort of mashed up the mince a little so that it wasn’t in deformed sausage shapes. To go along with my sausage mince, I cut up some green beans and boiled them up to partly cook them and also cut up some mushrooms.

So I started cooking the sausage mince and roughly chopping it up with the wooden spoon, but not to the extent I would have been chopping it up if I was making spaghetti bolognaise with proper mince. Added the mushrooms once the meat was browned and cooked a little more to start the mushrooms off. Then I added the beans and a little of the water I cooked them in along with a jar of Basil and Red Wine bolognaise sauce along with done dried oregano, salt and pepper to compliment the flavoured sausages. While this was all happening I put the pasta on and cooked that while all this was happening in the frypan (I wanted a great big tubular type of pasta, but only had fettuccini so that had to do). So it simmered away for the time it took the pasta to cook and then I served it up! It was delicious, well I thought so anyway.

There was too much sauce I think for the execution. One of the smaller pasta Stir-through sauces would have been better, but the idea was there, and it satisfied my craving to cook and to eat this mystical dish I had been thinking about for so long. I will adapt and change it a little and it will be fixed and improved! I think in the recipe I read on my RSS feed used plain Passatta sauce, but that might have been a bit too rich as well, maybe a simple fresh tomato sauce would have been better. Anyway, I will implement these changes and see how I go, I think the concept was there and the potential is very high for great success. But it was great as it was, but in true Nancy style, I will never cook it the same way again, I will change it up and do it different every time I cook it from now on. Always room for improvement! Life is too short to have the same thing all the time ;-)

XO

NJC