Last week I made some pasta with (jarred) marinara sauce and homemade meatballs. As soon as I started eating it I found myself on my knees shaking my fork towards the food gods above, cursing them for letting me make pasta and jarred red sauce. Almost every time I eat it I end thinking it’s too salty and an evil bout of indigestion will be waiting for me within minutes of finishing. The only red pasta sauce I REALLY like these days is my homemade Bolognese sauce. With that said, I was in the mood for pasta today and remembered a recipe I made once last year that was pretty darn good and avoids straight up red sauce.
The original (pretty darn good) recipe is Italian Chicken Sausage Pasta from the blog centercutcook.com which blends marinara and alfredo sauces together to make sort of a vodka sauce.
I don’t particularly like chicken sausage (it always tastes like a dolled up hot dog to me), so in the version I made last year–and in today’s high-speed Cat 5 version–I used two links of hot Italian turkey sausage freed from their condom-like sheaths and sautéed in extra virgin olive oil along with a small diced onion and a generous amount of red pepper flakes.
My high-speed, bastardized, dummied down, possible crap, Cat 5 version skips some of the dried spices, the minced garlic (I used a garlic & onion red sauce*) and only uses roughly a half-ish cup of each sauce. I also use low-fat light alfredo sauce which, as made, saved 80 calories and 12 grams of fat. I coulda/shoulda used whole wheat pasta but I had a bag of my favorite DeLallo pasta on hand and went with that. Of course the carb/wheat haters out there will tell you both types of pasta are equally bad, but I disagree, choosing to eat such “killer foods” as beer, pasta, sugar in my coffee, and potatoes at will, all the while maintaining that feminine soft meets masculine husky look that many find über attractive and often has people confusing me for a butch lesbian… Not that there’s anything wrong with that (other than I’m not really trying to look like a butch lesbian and that I’m a dude. I’m pretty sure you need to first be a woman before you can actually be a lesbian).
Long story and totally unneeded, unwanted, uninformative, unfunny blog post short: I liked it a lot. The original recipe is very good and worth making (except for the hot dogs chicken sausage) but I really dig this stripped down version and will surely make it again in the future. And not just because I’m lazy, eat bovine sized portions of pasta each day, and happen to have two half jars of sauce and more turkey sausage in the fridge!
Back to riding tomorrow (I hope) and talk of something other than pasta. As per usual with posts like this; you have my apologies in advance.
Later.
*Note: I added finely diced onions but no garlic, saying “I used a garlic & onion red sauce.” So why did I add the onion? Not sure… Lazy? Dumb? Your call, either way you’re probably right.