Ree Drummond’s Rigatoni With Broccolini and Sausage Will Fill You Up
The Pioneer Woman made a delicious pasta dinner. Here’s how to make Ree Drummond’s rigatoni with broccolini and sausage recipe.
Ree Drummond’s rigatoni with broccolini and sausage recipe
Drummond says when it comes to weeknight dinners, you have to have a pasta dish. She describes her rigatoni with broccolini and sausage recipe as a “very hearty, wonderful, meaty meal.” She says it’s so good, you’ll “fall in love.”
Drummond starts by boiling rigatoni in a pot. Once the rigatoni starts boiling, she takes Italian sausage, tears it into chunks, and cooks it in a pan. Once the sausage is halfway cooked, she adds thinly sliced onion and about three to four garlic cloves. Drummond says you can add as many cloves as you would like.
Drummond says Ladd Drummond wasn’t a fan of pasta when they were first married. “I don’t think pasta is a thing on ranches,” she says during The Pioneer Woman show. “You just didn’t grow up eating it. I grew up eating pasta. So, I kind of found the best of both worlds.”
The Accidental Country Girl says she tends to like vegetarian pastas with angel hair and light wine garlic sauces. “If you want to find a pasta that Ladd and the cowboys like to eat, you’ve got to fill it with meat and heartiness and all the good things in life, and this totally fits that bill,” says Drummond about her rigatoni with broccolini and sausage recipe.
Drummond likes that this recipe includes broccolini because you can add “sneak in” vegetables. If you’re serving this meal to someone who isn’t a big fan of vegetables, this could be the perfect dish to serve. “You sneak in the broccolini, so you’re getting your vegetables in there before they know what hit them,” jokes Drummond. “They’ve had their meat, [and] they’ve had their vegetables.”
Preparing the pasta sauce
Next, Drummond adds tomato paste to the pan, and stirs it around. As she stirs the sauce, she lets it fry on the bottom of the pan. Then she adds crushed red pepper flakes and ½ cup of water. She says this helps the mixture become saucy and creates a good consistency for a pasta sauce.
Next Drummond places the broccolini in the pot with the pasta. She warns against adding the broccolini too early because you want it to remain firm but tender. Drummond pours the broccolini and pasta into the pan containing the sauce. She then sprinkles parmesan cheese on top of the pasta and sauce before stirring the ingredients. Once the ingredients are mixed, Drummond adds more parmesan cheese and parsley.
Ree Drummond loves spaghetti
One pasta dish Drummond enjoys eating is spaghetti and meatballs. She jokes she would be devasted if she was never able to eat spaghetti and meatballs again. However, one thing she enjoys just as much as eating spaghetti is the process of cooking this meal.
“What I’m trying to say in a roundabout, backward, incoherent, motormouthed way is that I derive a great deal of satisfaction from cooking spaghetti and meatballs,” says Drummond on The Pioneer Woman website. “There’s just something about the mixing of the meatballs, the forming them into compact little rounds, the browning them in the same pot in which you’ll eventually add the sauce ingredients, the adding of the meatballs to the sauce. The steady simmer, during which the meatballs impart their flavor to the sauce.”
RELATED: ‘The Pioneer Woman’ Ree Drummond Says This 3-Cheese Quesadilla Recipe Is Her Favorite
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