So I took up the challenge.
After my last post, one of my readers suggested rather than
going to a standard recipe for each region of Italy we will be visiting, pick
an ingredient from that region and create a dish around it. I mean, really, isn’t that what “Think Like A
Chef” is all about?
I chose fennel, and on to the supermarket I went.
On the way to the store, I was thinking how could I cook it,
and what would go well with it? I knew I
wanted pasta (gluten free, of course) somewhere in the dish, but how would I
incorporate the fennel? In the end, I
decided to roast the fennel.
Next decision? What
kind of sauce? I had a couple of ways I
could go here. I could buy something
canned – nah. Next, I could make my own
– maybe. I could buy some tomatoes, seed
and dice them, and use that – maybe.
Or…I could buy grape tomatoes, and roast them with the fennel, and put
those of top of whatever it is that I am making. Yes!
Now…protein. Chicken
is too obvious. I decided that an
Italian sausage would be good. I chose
to go with turkey sausage, so I could keep the fat content as low as
possible. Now, what kind of Italian
sausage? This may come as a surprise to
some of my regular readers, but I decided to go with sweet rather than
hot. As you know, I like bold flavors,
and I’m not put off by heat. But in the
past, every time I’ve cooked with Italian sausage, I always end up regretting
not using the sweet sausage. So really,
that was a no brainer.
At this point, my brain took over and I wandered off to the
Italian food section of my megamart.
Maybe there was something I could add to the dish? Artichokes…maybe. But maybe that would take away from the
fennel. Pine nuts? Not a huge fan. After going back and forth for about 15
minutes, I decided the KISS rule applies, and I decided to stick with my small
list of ingredients.
So, first I roasted the fennel and the grape tomatoes, making
sure to switch the position of the pan ½ way through. I roasted them at 350 degrees, with some
olive oil. At the 20-minute mark, the
fennel was almost done, but not quite, as they were still a bit too crunchy, and
still retained a lot of the licorice flavor and not being sweet enough. After five more minutes, they were just
right.
In the meantime, I chopped up an onion and some garlic. I was also boiling the water so the pasta
could go in. I took the casing off of
the sausage and broke that up in a pan with a little bit of olive oil. After that was cooked, in went the onion and
the garlic. By this time, the roasting
of the vegetables was done, and was cooling off slightly, while the pasta went
in the salted boiling water. I managed
to time it perfectly, and once the onions were cooked, the gluten free pasta
went into a bowl, the sausage mixture went on top of that, and then op top of
that went the roasted grape tomatoes and fennel, and I finished it off with
some pecorino Romano cheese.
This is the result.
It was really good.
For sure, I think it was the prettiest dish I have come up with, and it
tasted great. The fennel had just enough
crunch to it, to give the dish some texture, and I didn’t miss having a
traditional sauce at all. Cathy said,
“This one’s a keeper!”
As for calories, one bowl is 539 calories with 14 grams of
fat. But 9 of the grams was from the
olive oil, so really, most of the fat content was good fat. If you left out the cheese, it would have
been even less.
