Spicy Sausage and Aubergine Rigatoni

Fresh, delicious and filling, we love this recipe for spicy sausage and aubergine rigatoni. If you’ve followed the HM blog for any time you’ll know we favour quick and easy recipes that are packed full of flavour and great for mid-week or weekend meals, wether you need to feed two or a family of five.

Ingredients

• 500g rigatoni pasta (or any other pasta in the cupboard will do)
• 1 x pack of 6 good quality sausages, skins removed
• 2 heaped teaspoons of fennel seeds, crushed in a pestle and mortar
• 1 tablespoon tomato purée (we like this one – amazing taste!)
• 1 clove of garlic, peeled and finely chopped/crushed
• A glug of white wine
• 2 aubergine, large dice
• 1 red pepper, large dice
• Freshly grated parmesan and basil (optional)
• Sea salt and black pepper to taste

Method

1. Place the aubergine and red pepper on a baking tray and roast in the oven until crispy. Around 180°C fan, for about 20 minutes should do the trick.

2. Using a heavy bottom pan (we use the Staub cast iron cookware), heat a little olive oil over a medium heat. Add the sausage meat and fry off until lightly browned. To start with it all sticks together and is quite difficult to separate, but once it starts to catch, it will separate into bits. It’s good to let it catch to get a bit of colour – the crispy bits are always the best bits! Add the crushed fennel seeds and garlic and stir for 1 – 2 minutes to combine. At this stage, the sausage meat will be continuing to brown so add a good glug of white wine and stir in – you may need to increase the heat to reduce the added liquid. Once the wine has reduced, add the tomato purée and stir in. Turn the heat down to a low heat and pop the lid on to let it simmer.

3. Boil a pan of water and add a pinch of salt. Add the rigatoni pasta and cook according to packet instructions.

4. Remove the vegetables from the oven, and add to the sausage mixture. Stir in well.

5. Next, drain the pasta using a slotted spoon and add it to the sausage meat mixture – we recommend adding a little pasta liquid to loosen it up and make it more sauce-like. Stir to combine and season well with salt and lots of cracked black pepper.

6. Once plated, we added freshly chopped basil but you could omit this completely, or use this and parmesan. This is such a versatile dish that it has become the perfect staple. You could use other veggies of course, it does work really well to use sausage meat with the fennel, garlic and white wine but large king prawns could also be delicious – we might try that next time!