Fettucine with Sausage and Kale

This pasta dish gets a high recommendation from me.  What a perfect anytime of the year pasta dish.  It was so very tasty, and easy to prepare.  If you like sausage and you like kale, and who doesn’t like fettucine? Joel managed to pick out every last piece of kale, but I don’t mind because he put it all on my plate. I used baby kale which is just perfect and if you can get turkey sausage it will be that much healthier. It is light, only 3 tablespoons of olive oil, a little chicken broth and Pecorino Romano and you’re finished. Very quick meal, very few ingredients, and it is restaurant worthy for sure. Simple, hearty and delicious. No extra added salt because you have the sausage which is plenty salty enough. I of course used spicy sausage , use whatever you prefer.

*Originally posted back in 2016 but for those of you new to my site this one is a keeper.

*serves 4 as main course

Ingredients:

3 tbsp. olive oil

1 lb. turkey or pork sausage, out of casing, and crumbled. Use hot or sweet sausage, whichever you prefer — if you can get chicken sausage it would be perfect as well. If you can’t find any of these use crumbled dark meat turkey or chicken!

1/2 lb. baby kale , if you can’t find baby kale use regular kale and remove tough stems and center ribs and coarsely chop the kale. Because I used baby kale, I just used as is, perfection!

1/2 lb. dried egg fettucine

1/2 cup chicken broth

Freshly grated Pecorino Romano for serving

Directions:

Heat olive oil in a 12″ heavy skillet over medium high heat until it shimmers, then cook sausage , breaking up any lumps. Once it browns up, about 7 minutes, take off heat and set aside.

Meanwhile, blanch kale in a 6 – 8 qt. pot of well-salted boiling water, uncovered, I cooked baby kale for about 3 minutes, it wilts quickly. I used a pasta insert and removed the kale and kept that water for cooking the pasta. If you don’t have a pasta insert you can just remove with a small sieve. You’ll want to cook fettucine in this water. I also highly recommend buying a pasta insert for pasta pots. There is a picture of the pasta insert that I use. I use the all clad one, they usually fit all pasta pots.

While pasta is cooking, dried egg fettucine cooks very quickly, add kale to sausage in the skillet and saute , stirring frequently on low heat for about 5 minutes. Add broth , stir and scrape any brown bits from bottom of skillet.

When pasta is done, reserve 1 cup of cooking water, then drain pasta. Add pasta and 1/2 cup reserved pasta water to skillet, tossing until well coated and well combined. If you require a little more moistening add a little more pasta water at a time till it reaches consistency that you are looking for. I only added 1/2 cup. If you’re going to let it sit for a while you may want to heat it up and throw in a little more pasta water as it heats up.

Serve immediately , with cheese if desired. I plated each bowl individually.