Pasta with Sausage and Rapini

Pasta with Sausage and Rapini
adapted from Last Night's Dinner

Ingredients

1 large bunch rapini, chopped into 1-inch pieces
1 pound penne, orecchiette or other chunky pasta
3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
1 pound hot Italian sausage, casings removed
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
6 tablespoons tomato paste
1/2 cup white wine
1/4 cup chicken stock
1 bunch green garlic, thinly sliced
1 small shallot, finely chopped
Kosher salt
1/3 cup freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus more for serving

Method

Bring a large pot of salted water to a rolling boil. Blanch the rapini for about a minute, until bright green. Remove from the pot with a spider or other large straining spoon and set aside. Bring the water back to a boil and cook the pasta until just shy of al dente.

Meanwhile, heat the olive oil in a deep saute pan over medium high heat. Cook the sausage in the pan, breaking it up with a spoon into bite-sized chunks, until no longer pink. Sprinkle the red pepper flakes over the sausage and saute about 30 seconds more. Add the tomato paste and stir it through. Let the sausage and tomato paste caramelize, then add the wine and stock and stir through.

Add the green garlic and shallot to the pan and saute for a minute or two, until just softening. Place the reserved rapini in the pan, season with salt and stir until well combined.

Drain the pasta and add to the sausage and rapini mixture, stirring well, and allow it to finish cooking in the sauce. Off the heat, stir in the grated cheese. Spoon pasta into warmed bowls and top with additional cheese, if desired.

NOTES

I faced two problems in trying to recreate this classic at home:

1) Nearly every recipe I have found for sausage and rapini pasta uses orecchiette. But Steve doesn't like the texture of that pasta (or many chunky pastas), so I opted for penne. This exacerbated problem number...

2) We find this dish to be really incohesive in its usual form, every element seeming separate from one another. The answer seemed to be to add tomato paste, which Jennifer's recipe did, and it got me going in the right direction. I doubled her amount of tomato paste, which resulted in a light sauce that really pulled everything together.

The green garlic, on both Jennifer's part and mine, was simply a seasonal stroke of luck. One of the wonderful farmers at the market tends to give it away this time of year, so I used it here. You can always use minced cloves of garlic, with or without the addition of the chopped shallot.