The Food
The pasta here is a penne rigate made out of durum wheat. This durable and ridged noodle is dressed with a mild sausage-tomato sauce, whose base is a sofrito of onions, garlic, celery, and carrots, underfried in vegetable oil. They were seasoned with dried basil, marjoram, oregano, rosemary, savory, and thyme.
The sausage was cooked first, removed, and later added back in with the tomatoes. The vegetables cooked in the pot after Marsala wine and red wine vinegar was used to deglaze the sausage fond (crispy bits).
The Parmesan garnish was freshly grated.
The Flavor
If you look up the word 'hearty' in a dictionary, you will probably find this picture. This heartiness comes not only from the density of the pasta and sausage, but also from the tongue and tummy warming Italian spices. The aromatic vegetables and garlic add an enjoyable depth of flavor to this fairly simple dish. Much of the same can be said of the Parmesan, which not only adds a special luxurious unctuousness, but also a nutty high-note in flavor.
This dish will leave you with a full stomach and a happy memory.
The Feeling
What's this? Dinner for breakfast?!
Well, recently, I almost always plan to skip my lunch break at work, so when I breakfast, I go big. Plus, there's something childishly wonderful when you have something you associate with one time of day at a different time, like breakfast-for-dinner, midnight-mimosas, and Christmas in July.
I employed a lot of cooking tricks in this dish. For example, when I accidentally added too much vinegar to deglaze the pot, I remembered to add in baking soda to harmlessly react with the acetic acid. I under-cooked the pasta in its water so that it could finish cooking in the bubbling ragu. And I added a little cornstarch slurry to thicken the sauce a little at the end.
Hopefully, I taught you something with this post, or, at the very least, made you a little hungrier.