Flavoursome, spiced Italian sausage and kale leaves cooked in a creamy sauce, and stirred through chunky rigatoni pasta, makes for a comforting and delicious and easy weeknight dinner!
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I came up with this recipe when Jamie was away for work and I wanted to “wine and dine” myself with something comforting, and nothing says comfort like curling up on the couch, watching trash tv shows and digging into a big bowl of pasta in my opinion!
Ingredients You Will Need:
- Onion
- Garlic
- Button mushrooms
- Kale
- Italian sausages
- Rigatoni pasta
- Cooking/pouring cream
- Chilli
- Salt and pepper
Recipe Notes
- Sausages: The star of this dish is the Italian sausage. If you can, I highly recommend paying a few dollars extra to get some good quality ones, as you will notice a considerable difference in flavour and quality if you step it up from just normal sausages you would throw on the BBQ. You want one that’s packed with meat, a little fat and lots of herbs and spices. Treat yourself, get the nice sausages!
- From sausages to mince: The thing that makes this dish a little bit different is that even though you’re using sausages, you actually only want the inside of them. (Again why good quality sausages are important here!). What you need to do is trim the ends of the sausage links a little to create an opening, and then you squeeze the filling straight into the pan. There is absolutely no graceful way to do this by the way, and if you have the sense of humour of a 10 year old boy like I do, it will give you a good chuckle. Once the sausage filling is in the pan, you will break it up with your spoon as it cooks to make it into a chunky mince for the dish. (If you would like to see a video on this technique, check out my instagram reel HERE).
- Can’t find kale? You can easily substitute the kale with any other leafy green vegetable, for example baby spinach, regular spinach, silverbeet or rainbow chard would all work really well in this!
- Are other pasta shapes ok? We love all pasta shapes in this household, there is no discrimination here. I do think though the large, chunky shape of rigatoni works so well in this dish, it holds its own and doesn’t get lost amongst all the other ingredients. But if you don’t have any rigatoni, any other pasta shape would work!
Creamy Italian Sausage and Kale Rigatoni
Flavoursome, spiced Italian sausages and kale leaves cooked in a creamy sauce, and stirred through chunky rigatoni pasta, makes for a comforting and delicious and easy weeknight dinner!
Ingredients
- 1 onion
- 4 cloves garlic
- 200 g button mushrooms
- 1/3 bunch kale
- 350 g rigatoni pasta
- 1 tbsp olive oil
- 500 g Italian sausages pork or beef
- 2 Birds Eye chilli optional
- 250ml cooking/pouring cream
- 125ml reserved pasta cooking water
- salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Put a pot of water on the stove to boil for your pasta
- Prep your ingredients: finely dice onion, mince garlic cloves, slice mushrooms, slice chilli if using, and remove the stalks from the kale leaves and tear them into smaller bite sized pieces. Seperate the sausage links, and trim one end of each sausage to create a small opening.
- Place your rigatoni into the boiling pot of water and cook for the recommended time on the packet for al dente pasta
- While the pasta is cooking, heat olive oil in in a large saucepan
- Add onion and garlic into the pan with the olive oil and sauté for 2-3 minutes, until onion is translucent and fragrant
- Take a sausage and hold the end of it tightly while you squeeze the filling out of the open end that you cut earlier straight into the pan. Repeat with all sausages.
- Using your wooden spoon, break the sausage into smaller bite sized pieces as it cooks in the pan. Cook for 6-7 minutes until golden and caramelised on the edges of the mince.
- Drain your cooked pasta, but reserve 125ml of the hot pasta water and set aside.
- Add mushrooms, chilli and kale into the pan with the sausages, onion and garlic. Cook for 3-4 minutes, until mushrooms are cooked and kale has wilted into the dish.
- Add pasta to the pan, as well as the cream, reserved pasta water, salt and pepper and stir well and heat through for 2-3 minutes.
- Taste the dish once again and if needed, add more salt and/or pepper to taste
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