Recipe: Quick & Easy Creamy Italian Sausage and Broccoli Fusilli Pasta

Quick and Easy Creamy Italian Sausage and Broccoli Fusilli Pasta:

One of my favorite quick and easy recipes to make after a long and stressful day at work is a Creamy Italian Sausage and Broccoli Fusilli Pasta. If you like creamy pasta, you'll love this easy recipe! My least favorite part of cooking a meal is the prep work involved, and this recipe involves minimal prep work! Of course, it would be very easy to turn this into a 20-step, 15 ingredient recipe, but why make it more difficult than it has to be, when the end result is already so mouth-wateringly delicious?

Creamy Italian Sausage and Broccoli Fusilli Pasta

(an original Little Wooden Chef creation)

Nearly all the ingredients in this recipe are store bought. Like I said earlier, you can hand make any of these ingredients if you desire. As is, this usually takes me about 20 minutes to make, from start to finish.

What you'll need:
1 lb Italian sausage (hot Italian sausage is delicious if you enjoy spicy foods!)
1 jar (24 oz.) garlic alfredo cream sauce
2 tbsp Minced garlic
12 oz fusilli pasta
1 small head of broccoli, chopped
Crushed red pepper flakes, to taste
Salt and pepper, to taste

1. Pre-heat a pan on the stove. When the pan is warm (check by placing your palm a few inches from the surface of the pan), lightly grease the pan with oil, put in the garlic, and break up the sausage in the pan.

Meanwhile, bring a large pot of water to a boil. As you can see in my example below, I used a large pan/wok for this step. This actually works quite well, and it eliminates one pot from cleanup duties later! As the water is nearing boil, put about a tablespoon of salt in the water. This is the only opportunity you'll have to flavor the pasta itself. Once the water is boiling, put in the fusilli pasta.

 2. As the sausage is cooking, lightly sprinkle salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper on the meat. If you don't like spicy food, you can omit the crushed red pepper. Alternatively, if you love spicy food and opted to also use hot Italian sausage, be careful not to put too much crushed red pepper in! You can always add more later. Once the sausage is fully cooked, remove it from the pan.

3.  Check the firmness of our pasta around the 6-8 minute mark. We want to remove the pasta from the boiling water right before it reaches al dente, since we'll be cooking it more in the next step. We don't want the pasta to be overcooked by the time we reach the end of the cooking process. Reserve one cup of the pasta water for the next step. The salted pasta water will help thin the cream slightly and also brings some starchiness to the sauce.

4. Combine the fusilli pasta with the sausage, and mix well.

4.  Add the cream sauce and reserved pasta water to the pan, and stir well to combine. Add salt, pepper, and crushed red pepper flakes to taste. I love using fusilli pasta for this recipe because the curls in the pasta hold sauce so well. Sauce would more easily slide off a straight pasta like a fettuccine or linguine. About three minutes before you're done cooking the pasta, add the broccoli. You don't want to cook the broccoli too long or it'll become a mushy mess. Once the pasta is al dente, you're done!

 5. Plate, and enjoy!