Lemon, fennel, onion, tagliatelle.
Our is starting with browning
a Sicilian-style sweet sausage with lemon and fennel.
And you can buy meat alternative plant-based sausage product
and add a little fennel to it,
or you can skip this portion of the recipe altogether
and it would still be tasty.
Or you could use, of course,
turkey or chicken sausage if you prefer.
Okay, so now I'm gonna take that out and let it drain
and pop it off to the side.
And then I'm gonna return the pan to the heat
and we're going to add a little bit more olive oil
into the little bit of sausage dripping in the pan.
And we're going to add the fennel
and onion
and lemon zest.
Now, to get that going we're going to add salt,
'cause that drives out all the liquids.
And I like white pepper in this dish.
The softer pepper flavor.
Okay, so now I'm grating in the garlic
'cause we've got this delicious mush going down.
And now we're going to add...
Ah!
This beautiful, bright, crisp white wine.
It's an Italian wine from Pecorino.
Which is where Pecorino cheese, of course...
Lots of sheep. Lots of great cheese, lots of great wine.
A Tuscan white, crisp and delightful.
And we're gonna let that cook through.
So this is our tagliatelle. It comes in little nests.
And this is an egg pasta,
so this will cool pretty quick for us.
But you can use any...
Actually, for this dish you could use long or short.
So now our wine is absorbed
and we're salting our pasta water generously
and dropping our tagliatelle into the water.
Give that a little zhoosh, a little stir.
Get it goin' in the hot tub there.
And now to our front pan
we're going to add in our cream,
about a half a cup.
And we're going to give that a gentle, gentle stir.
And then, if you're using it,
we're going to slide back in the sausage.
Here's John's Sicilian sausage with lemon and fennel.
Of course there's fresh fennel in the sauce.
And let that just kind of all hang out together.
Go.
And...
Add that bit of lemon juice.
This is my favorite part:
marrying pasta with sauce.
Yum.
So we take a quick cup,
doesn't even have to be a measuring cup.
Just a coffee cup, my mom always used.
Turn the pasta off.
Drain it or pull it out with tongs.
I'm just gonna drain mine.
And then we're going to toss all of the pasta
with all of the sauce.
And use our starchy cooking water,
seasoned with salt, as we need it,
to make everybody get along.
We're gonna add our cheese. Parmigiano-Reggiano.
And turn this off.
And just start turning
that all back into each other.
And I'm going to save
a little bit of our arugula for the top
and I'm going to put the rest of our arugula,
a couple of cups of arugula, through our dish.
As I said, if this looks funny
it's because it's micro arugula
that I ordered from Chef's Garden.
We take the rest of our arugula
and scatter that in the center.