Recreate it: Penne with Turkey Sausage & White Wine Reduction

Last week, my fab friend Lindsey and I discovered a sweet little Italian restaurant called La Carbonara. A tiny restaurant with exposed brick and illuminated by candles, La Carbonara serves up delicious Italian fare with a modern twist. In addition to a bottle of Montepulciano (an Italian red wine, which at $25 a pop is a major steal for any Manhattan restaurant), I dined on orecchiette with broccoli rabe, sweet Italian sausage and cherry tomatoes, the latter of which quite honestly, I can't seem to get out of my head. At a sweet $9.95, this dish had all the right flavor moves and was served in a manageable portion - something virtually unheard of in an Italian restaurant. So with the orecchiette in my head for the last week, I decided to recreate it in my very own tiny kitchen. And I have to tell you, with some subtle substitutions to fit my own culinary parameters, I think it came pretty darn close to the original. Oh, and did I mention that it's healthy to boot? Full of fresh veggies and turkey sausage, this dish is destined to make my weekly repetoire. Check it out...

Pasta with Turkey Sausage & White Wine Reduction
1 box pasta of your choice (I couldn't find orecchiette, so I went with penne)
1 lb. turkey sausage, removed from casings
1 pkg grape tomatoes
1 bag fresh baby spinach
1C white wine (I used a cheap-o Pinot Grigio)
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
olive oil
parmesan cheese
kosher salt
pepper

Cook pasta according to box directions. Meanwhile, heat olive oil in skillet and add tomatoes which have been sliced in half. Add garlic and kosher salt, sauteeing until soft and they start to smell heavenly.

When desired heavenlyness is reached, remove from the pan and set aside. In that very same skillet, you'll cook the sausage. Remove the sausage from their casings (this is easily done by cutting a slit down the center of each one and removing the skin by hand...it's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it...oh, and wash your hands after this part) and add to the skillet which should still be hot. Let's face it, turkey sausage just doesn't have the same flavor as the real thang, which is why you should get the pan super hot with some olive oil before adding the sausage. Resist the urge to break it up immediately as you want to let it brown a bit. This will provide some great, and necessary flavor. Once it starts to brown on the bottom, you can start breaking it up and turning it over until all browned. Now comes the fancy schmancy reduction part. Remove sausage from pan. Deglaze said pan with 1 C white wine, scraping up the brown bits from the tomatoes and sausage as you go. Oh, and the beauty of cooking with wine? The chef gets to sample along the way (for research purposes, of course). Bring to a boil and reduce by half (that's the reduction!). Add turkey and tomatoes back in and sprinkle generously with parmesean cheese. Add spinach and stir until it wilts.

And it looks like this...

Serve over pasta and prepare to be hooked.

So that's how I recreated a fabulous restaurant dish in my very own apartment kitch. Have you ever tried to recreate a restaurant dish at home? How did it turn out?

Psst...I did in fact make another turkey sausage pasta dish, which you can find right here...but I must be honest and tell you that this newer one really hit it out of the park! For a variation, check out the old one.

Freebies: National Pancake Day

Breakfast fans, rejoice! Everyone's favorite pancake house, The International House of Pancakes, that is, will be giving away free pancakes today, from 7am to 11pm. If you're into that kind of thing, stop by your local IHOP, and fill 'er up with a short stack (that's 3 pancakes for you short stack novices). Personally, I am a HUGE fan of pancakes (who isn't?) however, I have to tell you that I'm honestly not sure that there are any IHOP locations near me...and I'm pretty sure it's not in the near proximity. If I were to scope it out, however, I'd be chowing down on the short stack with a bit o'maple and strawberry syrup. Yum. Oh, and to get your FREE pancakes, IHOP requests a small donation towards their Children's Miracle Network charity. Pancakes and a good cause? Does it get any better?

When Bad Dishes Happen to Good People: Black Bean Soup

I know. It seems like every recipe in TAA kitchen is a winner. After all, when Snickerdoodle Muffins, Key Lime in the Coconut Cupcakes and Butternut Squash Soup come out of it, I may give off the illusion that things never go awry and that every recipe is pure tasting perfection. The reality is that some recipes are...how do you say...duds. I hate to admit it, and I hate to point fingers, but sometimes for any number of reasons, a recipe just doesn't get 'er done. And let's just not even get into mishaps beyond recipe duds. For today, we'll stick with Black Bean Soup. A recipe that seemingly had all the right moves; red onions, bell peppers, spices. But after a 3 hour bath in the slow cooker, it just tasted...bland. There was nothing to it. Even after continuously adding kosher salt (the cure all to just about everything), it didn't change the flavor...at all. Though this was a couple of weeks ago, I remain baffled to this very day. After all, the early ingredients in the recipe looked like this:
And when it looks this pretty, how could it go so wrong?
I refuse to blame this little baby, which has brought many a mean soup and chili over the last year.
After some restrospective investigation, I realized it could be a number of things:
1. I have never cooked with dried beans before. Typically, I'm a from-the-can kind of girl. Perhaps I did not cook the soup long enough?
2. Perhaps it just needed a serious bump up in the spice department
3. The recipe called for pureeing some of the soup and then mixing it back in. Though the wall got a good splattering of black bean juice, that aside, I thought I had done it as instructed. Perhaps I should have pureed more?
I could go on and on. I'm just still baffled by what went wrong, since the recipe seemed to get glowing reviews and I could swear that I followed it line by line. Has this happened to you before? On any dish in your culinary past? Did you uncover the mystery of what went wrong? Give me some love by sharing your tales of woe...