Roasted Sausage and Rosemary with Linguine

Hi!

I've been awful lately, neglecting my cooking, neglecting my blogging, generally being lax. Although, in my defense, we had a public holiday this week, and I went away for the weekend! I have many, many lovely things to say about the delicious food we had while we away, but that's for another post.

Over the weekend Cape Town hosted the International Book Fair, which I always go to. It brings together publishers and authors, bookshops and bibliophiles from all across the country, and from other countries, to sell and show books, beautiful books! So, you can tell I'm a fan. This year was smaller than usual, and since I've been a regular at Paperweight this year, I didn't buy as many books as I usually do, settling for only one. But I did come across some delectable looking foodie magazines, delicious. magazine, and a Feel Good Food magazine, from Woman & Home.

In any event, I pored through these, collecting inspiration. I'm not usually very good at following recipes directly, i usually just use them as a guideline and make it up as I go along. So in Feel Good Food, I found a recipe for roasted sausages with rosemary tomatoes, and I thought, YUM!! I don't cook with rosemary often, in fact, I didn't even have any in the cupboard, but I thought this was a brilliant time to try it. We felt like 'long pasta', so we got some linguine, and I upped the liquids, to make it more saucy. I can't find a link to the recipe online, it seems to only be available in print! So here it is, for your cooking pleasure, with my changes!

Roasted Sausage and Rosemary with Linguine

Ingredients:

1 packet of fresh pork sausages (I used the skinny ones for use with pasta)

1 onion, sliced

3-5 baby marrows

3-4 yellow patty pans

1/2 packet of cherry tomatoes

1/2 whole fresh tomato, chopped small

1 tbsp rosemary leaves, fresh or dried

100ml chicken stock

cooking or olive oil for frying

1/2 packet linguine

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 200 degrees Celsius.
2. Heat some oil in a pan, and slice the onion. 
3. Fry the onion in the pan on a medium heat till soft. 
4. Chop the marrows and patty pans, and any other vegetable you have or think would be nice, and throw them in with the onion. The original recipe only used cherry tomatoes and onion, but I want a more rounded meal, and added the marrows in. 
5. When the onion and veggies are soft, add the rosemary, and either decant into a dish, or push to the side of the pan. 
6. Turn up the heat, and add the sausages, to brown them. I ended up removing the onion mix, as there wasn't enough space with the sausages in the pan, and I didn't want the onion to burn while the sausages browned. 
7. Once the sausages are brown, put back the onion mix, and add the chicken stock, bring to the boil and simmer for a few minutes, not more than 5. 
8. Transfer the whole lot to an oven proof dish, and pop in the cherry tomatoes and the chopped tomato. 
9. I used the chopped tomato partly because I had so few cherry tomatoes, and partly because they have more liquid, and would flavour the dish well. 
10. Put the pasta on once the dish is in the oven. 
11. Cook according to packet instructions and set aside. 
12. Pop the whole thing, uncovered, into the oven and bake for 20 minutes, or until the sausages are cooked. 
13. After it baked, I popped it under the grill for a few minutes, to burst the tomatoes and blacken the sausages a bit, but it's not crucial. 
14. Since I was making it for pasta, I needed a sauce, not just a gravy. So I drained the liquids back into the pan, and thickened it with a little cornflour, then poured it back on top of the rest.

When the pasta's cooked, serve into bowls, and spoon sauce over. You can also grate some Parmesan on top, but we had it without, and it was perfect! I had plates being licked left, right and centre! We all agreed that it was the rosemary that absolutely MADE this dish! Delicious! Enjoy! PS. Sorry about the lack of photos, starving family doesn't make for great photo taking, and frankly, I wasn't sure if this would work out!