Chestnut, sausage pasta

Ahh, hello. First post of my new blog. Let's see how long this lasts. I have a feeling this is going to expose that I only actually find recipes from one or two places. Hopefully it will push me to try searching for things from a little further afield.

So, this is a little something I knocked up for lunch the other day from some leftovers. The original meal was a Nigel Slater recipe for stuffed mushrooms where you sprinkle big flat mushrooms with madeira and thyme before baking in the oven. Then stuffing with a mixture of fried onion, chestnuts, sausage meat and breadcrumbs. This was OK, but not something I'd make again.

The stuffing however was both lovely and very plentiful. So with stacks of leftovers I thought this might make the base of a nice pasta dish. The original dish called for the stuffing to be cooked briefly in the pan before stuffing the mushrooms and baking for half an hour.

For this pasta dish I drew a bit of inspiration from Jamie Oliver's Proper Blokes Pasta which I've cooked before. He uses Italian sausages, crumbled from their skins and then cooked down until the meat caramelises. It adds nice texture and makes the flavour of the meat sweeter and more intense. Also, as I was using the stuffing I'd already made, the bread crumbs were already incorporated. If I was to make this again from scratch I think I might fry the bread crumbs separately and mix it with the parsley and maybe some chopped raw garlic to make a fresh tasting gremolata to sprinkle on top of the pasta.

Sorry for the slightly crap photo. If I'm going to stick with this I think I'm going to have to invest in a new phone with a decent camera.

Ingredients

dash of olive oil
knob of butter
1/2 medium onion, diced
approx 200g of sausage meat (about two sausages worth, removed from the skins)
1/2 sprig of rosemary, chopped
50g breadcrumbs
50g chestnuts, chopped
100ml white wine
2 tablespoons of creme fraiche
4 tablespoons parmesan (plus extra for serving)
handful of parsley

Method

To make the sausage meat 'stuffing' put the onion in a frying pan with the butter and oil, crumbled sausage meat, the chopped rosemary, breadcrumbs and the sausage meat with some seasoning. Cook it right down until the sausage meat had caramelised slightly and everything else was nice and crispy.

Then add the white wine and wait for the alcohol to cook off. When the pasta is cooked, stir a dollop of creme fraiche through the sauce with the parmesan and some of the pasta cooking water, just to loosen the sauce. To finish I added the al dente pasta to the frying pan to warm in through and mix in the sauce before finishing with a handful of parsley, seasoning and more parmesan.