Comfort Pasta

One of my go-to meals whenever I go back to the US isn’t that exciting, but I love it dearly for its pure comfort and deliciousness: orchiette with Italian sausage and broccoli rabe. I probably started eating it circa 2007/2008 at some tiny Italian joint in Williamsburg with @clmehta and, by the time I moved uptown in 2009, I was making it at home, with fresh fennel sausage, pasta and broccoli rabe schlepped 15 blocks north from Agata and Valentina. I felt so grown up and accomplished cooking it in our apartment— a dish you could find at a restaurant, with ingredients from a grocery store friends’ moms had been shopping at for decades. I wasn’t even 30. 

Fast forward a decade+: I’m a much better cook than I was back then and I’m living in E17 not on East 94th Street. But Italian sausage is hard to come by in London, as is broccoli rabe, so what’s a gal to do? 

1) Cook the OG dish when I’m back in the US (obviously), and sometimes even take a container to eat on the plane back to London, and 2) come up with a totally different but equally delicious riff on the classic— namely orchiette with 💣-ass spicy lamb merguez sausage from @swaledalebutchers and @natoora chard. Same same. But different. #sausagepasta4eva