5 ingredient tomato & mascarpone sauce

Here’s a quick mid-week recipe that always goes down well in our house. It’s made from 5 ingredients (excluding the salt and pasta!) and is a lovely creamy tomato sauce that works with any pasta. You can also easily adapt the recipe for meat-eaters by changing the sausage or switching for crispy bacon pieces.

Personally I think the sauce is really nice used on it’s own with just a little parmesan, if you want to leave out the sausages completely, or stir in a couple of handfuls of spinach to change things up.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

• 6 veggie sausages, 1 cm slices

• 1 large onion, chopped finely

• 1 large garlic clove, grated

• 2 x 400g tinned tomato

• 100g mascarpone cheese

• 1 tsp sea salt

• 400g rigatoni

Method

• Heat ½ tbsp rapeseed or olive oil in a large shallow pan and cook on a medium heat for around 8-10 minutes until browned.

• Remove from the pan and set aside in a covered bowl.

• Heat a little more oil in the pan and then add the onions. Cook on a low heat for about 10 minutes until softened.

• Next add the garlic and stir in well. Allow to cook for about 1 minute.

• Pour in the tinned tomatoes and ½ a tin of water (swill out the remaining tomato juice) then simmer for 20 minutes.

• Cook the pasta after the sauce has been bubbling for 10 minutes, so they’re ready at the same time.

• At this point you can either break the tomatoes up with a wooden spoon or blitz the sauce with a hand blender. I prefer to do the latter, then add the mascarpone, salt and sausages. Stir well and make sure the cheese has completely melted and the sausages have warmed through.

• Serve with plenty of grated parmesan and a green salad.

Easy sausage & tomato pasta

This is a very simple pasta dish that won’t take you long to prepare. It’s one of those dinners that is just an easy crowd pleaser on any night of the week and is super flexible as it can be vegetarian, vegan or meaty!

I’ve kept the ingredient list short and the method straightforward, so it can become one of your back pocket recipes that you can just throw together without referring back here.

Ingredients

Serves 4

• 1 tbsp olive oil

• 6 vegetarian or pork sausages

• 1 large onion, chopped finely

• 1 garlic clove, grated or chopped finely

• 2 x 400g tins of tomatoes

• 1 tsp balsamic or red wine vinegar

• ½ tsp sea salt

• A good grind of black pepper

• A small handful of basil leaves, torn

• A handful grated parmesan

• Your choice of pasta

Method

• First cut the sausages into 2cm thick slices. Defrost thoroughly first if you’re using frozen, if you’re using pork I would squeeze the meat out of the casing and roughly roll into small balls.

• Whatever kind of sausage you’re using, preheat ½ tbsp of olive oil in a large pan and fry the pieces until browned on all sides. This will take about 5-6 minutes for vegetarian sausages and a little longer for meat (check the inside middle temperature is at least 63ºc with a meat thermometer).

• Remove the sausage pieces from the pan and put in a covered bowl. Set aside.

• Add ½ tbsp olive oil to the pan, heat and then put in the onions. Fry on low for about 15 minutes until softened and beginning to brown.

• Then add the garlic and cook for 1 minute, stirring well.

• Next pour in the tomatoes and simmer with the lid on for 20 minutes.

• Break up the tomatoes if they not already chopped, add 1 tsp balsamic vinegar and the sausage pieces. Allow the sauce to bubble for a further 5 minutes (making sure the sausage has heated through properly) and then add the basil leaves, salt and pepper.

• Serve with any kind of pasta you like!

Tip

• I actually didn’t have any basil in when I made this, so don’t worry if it’s missing, the sauce still tastes great!

• Add a blob of mascarpone cheese or crème fraîche to make it creamy, chilli flakes for heat, slices of jarred (so no extra cook time) red pepper for sweetness, spinach leaves for greenery! All these additions would go in for the final 5 minutes with the sausage.

• Make the sauce vegan by leaving out the parmesan and use plant based sausages.

• Meat-eaters could switch sausage for small pieces of crispy bacon.

veggie sausage, mushroom & spinach rigatoni

This is a family favourite in our house and as it only takes about 20 minutes to make it’s a recipe I keep returning to when I want a tasty mid-week meal. We’ve also been trying to gradually reduce our meat intake as a household and this is a dish that my carnivore middle son and my vegetarian daughter both devour. I’d say it’s a vegetarian meal that even the keenest meat eater would (perhaps begrudgingly!) enjoy.

It’s a good one for students too; my son is at uni and he makes this quite regularly as it’s a nice alternative to the classic student tomato pasta - I think that’s all he ate in his first year!

The recipe is flexible in that you can switch (or remove) the vegetables if you don’t like them or want a change. Leeks, carrots, broccoli, kale, peas, sweetcorn or even roasted butternut squash would all work really well, but you would need to adjust the cooking times accordingly. I would sub leeks, carrots, broccoli or other veggies that need a longer cooking time for the mushrooms and then add frozen peas, sweetcorn or roasted squash at the last minute instead of spinach. Kale would need a little longer to cook properly.

Ingredients

Serves 4

• 1 tbsp rapeseed or olive oil

• 6 Quorn sausages, chopped into diagonal slices

• 1.5 tbsp butter

• 1 clove garlic, grated

• 400g chestnut mushrooms, sliced

• 1.5 tbsp plain flour

• 1/2 vegetable stock cube ( I like Kallo low salt)

• 400ml water

• 200ml crème fraîche (I use half fat if I can find it)

• 1 tsp Dijon mustard

• Juice of 1/4 lemon

• 1/2 tsp sea salt

• 60g grated parmesan

• 100g spinach

• 320g rigatoni

Method

• Warm 1/2 tbsp olive or rapeseed oil in a wide bottomed pan and add the sausage slices, cook on a medium heat for 3-4 minutes so that they start to brown.

• Then melt the butter and 1/2 tbsp oil in the same pan, before adding the garlic, stir well and then add the mushrooms. Cook on a medium heat for about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.

• Fill a large lidded pan of salted water and bring to the boil ready for the pasta.

• Next sprinkle the flour on to the mushrooms and sausage, stir well to coat and then add the stock cube (crumbled), mustard and 400ml of water. Stir and allow to thicken, simmering on low for 5 minutes.

• Start to cook the pasta while the sauce is thickening.

• Add the crème fraîche, and 30g parmesan to the sausage mix, stir and warm through gently on low for 5 minutes while the pasta cooks. For the last minute mix in the spinach allowing it to wilt then finish with the lemon and salt.

• Drain the pasta (reserving a little cooking water) and add to the sauce.

• Loosen with 1-2 tbsp of the cooking water if needed. Serve with a good grind of black pepper and the remaining parmesan.

Tip

• Have all the ingredients prepped and ready to go as the overall cooking time is about 10 minutes so you need to go quickly once you start cooking the sausages.

• If you prefer to use pork sausages then just use the same method, but squeeze the filing out of the casing to create mini meat balls as the skin becomes tough and stringy if you just chop them up.

• I use Quorn sausages or Linda McCartney’s , but they do break up a little bit more than Quorn.

• Vegetable combinations to try: roasted butternut squash & kale, leek & spinach, mushroom & kale, broccoli & sweetcorn (to keep the kids happy!), peas & spinach.