the review: pesto orecchiette with chicken sausage

This pasta recipe has got to be the easiest thing that I’ve ever made. It’s like making ramen. I reviewed it once here, but didn’t go into any detail, so let’s try again.

If you can boil water, you can make this. The recipe actually calls for cooking the vegetables in the pasta water, but I wanted a little more flavor to my beans so I cooked them in the skillet with my sausage. I did add the frozen peas to my pasta water but you could also add them to the sausage with the beans. I used a random chicken sausage that I had in my freezer (yes, I do realize how ridiculous this sentence sounds), but the last time I made this, I used chicken sausage with sun-dried tomatoes and think that was better. Honestly, any old chicken sausage will do. The recipe calls for 8 ounces but I upped it to use the whole pack (what are you going to do with one chicken sausage). It was gone.

As for pasta, my local markets do not carry orecchiette. I will say I really like how the pesto and peas stick to the orecchiette if you can find some. If you can’t, find something flat with nice pockets so that you can get a good coating of pesto (and a couple of peas sticking to your pasta wouldn’t hurt). I used wagon wheels (leftover from arts and crafts, of course) but farfalle would work great too.

This is a perfect meal for nights when you have 52 activities with your kids or you just don’t feel like cooking. Start to finish 20 minutes. My kind of recipe.