I have an easy sauce recipe that I go to anytime I want to make a red sauce for pasta. This utilizes that sauce, but the sausage drastically changes the flavor of it. From start to finish this dish should take a little over an hour to make, but most of that is effortless wait til its ready time. Let's start off with what you'll need to get dinner going.
1 lb ground Italian sausage 1 medium onion 1tsp minced garlic 2 tsp oil 2 tbsp fresh basil 1 sm zucchini 1 sm crookneck squash 1 sm red pepper 1 sm green pepper 1 pint grape tomatoes | 2 cans fire roasted diced tomatoes with garlic 1 6 oz can tomato paste 1 8 oz can tomato sauce 1/2 tsp ground marjoram 1/2 tsp black pepper 1/2 tsp salt 1 tbsp granulated sugar 16 oz box penne 8 oz bag shredded Italian blend cheese (You could use just mozzarella, but I like the blend better.) |
Start off by browning the sausage in a large deep frying pan. Once its cooked through, drain and crumble into smaller pieces. (I know some people can brown their sausage into smaller pieces, but I always wind up with big clumps, no matter what I do, so I crumble it. If you are able to brown it so it looks a little more like ground beef than badly shaped mini sausage patties, by all means, don't worry about crumbling it.
While your sausage is browning, toss the onion and the basil into a food processor and pulse until it's finely chopped. Also, you'll want to cut the zucchini, squash, and the red and green peppers into chunks. Halve the grape tomatoes.
Using the same pan as you cooked the sausage in, toss in the oil, then the chopped onion and basil, the garlic, the halved tomatoes and all of your veggie chunks. Let this cook in the oil for 4-5 minutes before adding the sausage back to your pan.
While the veggies are cooking, put the canned tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce and the remaining seasonings into a food processor or blender. Puree.
When the veggies have begun to get tender, but are not quite cooked is when you want to add the pureed tomato mixture to the pan. Stir together and heat to boiling. Reduce heat and simmer this for about 15 minutes. During this time, cook your penne according to package instructions for al dente.
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