Penne and Smoked Sausage — The One-Pan Italian

Saturday I drove the truck up to Iris’s house in Bristow with the strawberry pound cake riding on the passenger seat under the glass dome and the macerated strawberry topping sealed in a Mason jar in the cup holder. Bristow is forty minutes from Sapulpa on backroads — past the wind farm where the white blades turn slow against the September sky, past the salvage yard with the hand-painted plywood “BUY GOLD” sign that’s been there since I was little, past two cattle gates and a creek crossing that floods every spring. Her family lives in a brick ranch outside the town proper, the kind of one-story house with a screened-in front porch and a rope-and-tire swing hanging from a sycamore in the front yard. Her mother, Karen, hugged me at the screen door before I’d even said my full name — she said, “Honey, Iris has not stopped talking about you since June” — and the screen door slammed behind me with that hollow aluminum-frame sound that means a house has been lived in by kids running in and out for two decades.

Iris’s father drives long-haul for a lumber company out of Tulsa and was somewhere in eastern Tennessee that weekend. Her two younger brothers, eleven and nine, were in the living room playing Madden on a PlayStation that had been hers in high school until she handed it down. Karen had set up the kitchen table for us — cleared off the mail pile, put down placemats, set out two glasses of sweet tea with lemon wedges, and a fresh pen and a stack of clean printer paper. She said, “You girls work. I’ll cook.” Then she went to the stove and didn’t look at us again for three hours.

Iris read me the grandmother piece page by page, slowly, and I marked every sentence I wanted her to absolutely keep with a small green check mark in the margin and put a tiny dot under any sentence I thought was carrying its weight without being a keeper, and a question mark next to the four sentences I thought might come out without losing anything. By the end of three hours, I had sixty-three green check marks across eleven pages, eleven dots, and four question marks. Iris stared at the marked-up pages on the table when we were done and said, in a kind of dazed voice, that nobody had ever read her work that closely, not even Marcus, and that the green-check sentences were going to be the spine of her final draft. She said that was the most useful editing she’d ever gotten in her life. I felt, for a second, like I’d done something real for somebody who’d already done something real for me.

Karen fed us lunch around one o’clock — a one-pan penne with sliced kielbasa-style smoked sausage, red and green bell peppers cut into wide strips, yellow onion in half-moons, garlic, a can of fire-roasted diced tomatoes, a half-cup of heavy cream, dried oregano, dried basil, and a fistful of grated parmesan stirred in at the end so it melted into the sauce instead of scorching on top. The whole dish came together in one twelve-inch skillet in under twenty-five minutes. The pasta cooked right in the sauce in a measured cup-and-a-half of chicken broth so the starch from the noodles thickened the cream and bound the whole thing into a single creamy red-orange dish that smelled like every Italian-American kitchen I’ve ever read about.

I asked Karen for the recipe before I left. She tore the back off a Walmart receipt from her purse, sat at the kitchen table with the same pen we’d been editing with, and wrote out the whole thing in pencil in tiny block letters with the measurements in fractions and a note at the bottom that said “DON’T BOIL THE NOODLES SEPARATE. THAT’S THE WHOLE TRICK.” I folded the receipt and put it in my back pocket and drove home with my hand on the pocket the whole way like I was carrying something fragile.

Sunday I made the same dinner for Mama. She ate two full plates standing at the kitchen counter without sitting down, which is what she does when she’s really hungry and really pleased and doesn’t want to lose momentum on either. She said, “You’ve gotten really good, baby.” She does not throw the word “really” around in compliments. I taped the Walmart receipt into the kitchen notebook on a fresh page and wrote underneath it: “Karen Bowman’s one-pan penne, learned 9-15-2018, mama-approved.”

Don’t boil the noodles separate. The starch from the dry pasta cooking in the sauce is the whole thing. Here’s how it goes.

Penne and Smoked Sausage

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 20 minutes | Total Time: 30 minutes | Servings: 4

Ingredients

• 12 oz penne pasta
• 1 lb smoked sausage, sliced into 1/4-inch rounds
• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 1 medium yellow onion, diced
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 can (14.5 oz) diced tomatoes, undrained
• 1/2 cup chicken broth
• 1/2 teaspoon smoked paprika
• 1/2 teaspoon Italian seasoning
• Salt and black pepper to taste
• 1/2 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
• 2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped (optional)

Instructions

1. Cook the pasta. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook penne according to package directions until al dente. Drain and set aside, reserving 1/4 cup pasta water.
2. Brown the sausage. Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Add sliced smoked sausage in a single layer and cook 3–4 minutes per side until browned. Transfer to a plate.
3. Soften the aromatics. In the same skillet, reduce heat to medium and add diced onion. Cook 4–5 minutes until softened. Add garlic and cook 1 minute more, stirring constantly.
4. Build the sauce. Add diced tomatoes, chicken broth, smoked paprika, and Italian seasoning to the skillet. Stir to combine and bring to a gentle simmer. Cook 5 minutes to let the flavors come together.
5. Combine. Return the sausage to the skillet. Add the drained penne and toss everything together. If the sauce feels tight, add reserved pasta water a splash at a time until it coats the pasta loosely. Season with salt and pepper.
6. Finish and serve. Divide into bowls and top with shredded Parmesan and fresh parsley if using. Serve hot — or let it cool and eat it cold from the container two days later. Both are valid.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 580 | Protein: 26g | Fat: 28g | Carbs: 58g | Fiber: 4g | Sodium: 980mg