Pasta with Sausage, Basil, and Mustard (The Food and Wine Cook-Through)

This was the first thing I made off of the Food and Wine Magazine 40 Best-Ever Recipes List. It was my original intention to go in order, but after reading through the recipes I quickly realized that there was no way that was going to work. Some of these bitches take NINE HOURS of prep time and random-ass ingredients. I don’t have nine hours of prep time at my disposal on any random given day - though I definitely have it on some days. This was not one of those days, so I went with the recipe that took 20 minutes and was full of basic shit that is real easy to get a hold of.

Heads up: I will not be making these recipes at random times of day for the sake of perfect iPhone food photo lighting. You can deal with a not-magazine -quality photo on a non-professional blog.

I’m going to make as many of these recipes as I can gluten-free - BUT - I’m not going to try to make the baked items gluten-free until I’ve made the ‘as written’ version. I want to make the recipes exactly as instructed for the first go-around, and then I’ll make my own twists later on with the ones I like or think I might enjoy more if they were a little different.

Pasta with Sausage, Basil, and Mustard

This was not one of those recipes. It’s super simple. You literally just cook pasta to al dente (I couldn’t find GF rigatoni, so I used Jovial Foods manicotti that I par-boiled and then cut into thirds for a rigatoni-like noodle), then toss it with browned hot Italian sausage meat that you’ve browned and simmered with white wine, mustard, cream, and tossed with basil.

I can easily see why this was added to the ‘Best Ever’ list. It’s crazy inexpensive, ridiculously easy, requires no ingredient that you have to Google, and quick enough to make on even the busiest night. It definitely kicked off our cook-through with a bang and set our hopes nice and high for the remaining 39 (spoiler alert: my husband and I were both significantly underwhelmed with the second recipe - Garlicky Braised Lamb with Sweet Peppers).

10/10 would recommend