Baked Cheesy Chicken Sausage Pasta

*dusts off blog*

Yes, I know, I know — its been some time.. but what matters is I’m back and more importantly, I’m back with food! Here’s a quick recipe I wanted to share because it truly was just too good to be true after I put such little effort into making it.

Side story — my air conditioning has been out for the past week. I live in Houston, TX and if you do too, you know that this situation is just shy of a nightmare. As a result, my ties with the stove and oven had been severed temporarily in order to keep my house from turning into the [effing] sun. Anywho — despite that, I decided to cook last night (using both the stove AND oven — crazy right?) but I went in with the goal of keeping my time in the kitchen as short as possible and this is what happened!

Baked Cheesy Chicken Sausage Pasta. A mouthful, literally. Here’s how I made it.

Stuff: 1/2 bag of Trader Joe’s Organic brown rice pasta, 1/2 jar of Trader Joe’s tomato basil marinara, 2 links from Trader Joe’s spicy Italian chicken sausage, 1 1/2 cup of shredded Mexican cheese (in pasta and on top), onion powder, kosher salt, black pepper, parsley & butter.

How: I boiled a pot of water and got the brown rice pasta cooking (my first time cooking/trying it and by the way: it is SO much better than wheat pasta and I actually now prefer it over regular pasta) while heating up a cast iron skillet for the sausage.

The sausage comes already cooked so there’s no need to cook it for very long. Since the sausage links came in casings, I had to peel them, used only about a tablespoon of butter and broke them down as it cooked (more) in the skillet.

Once I got it all ground up, I added half a jar of the marinara sauce and let it simmer. Once my pasta was cooked, I mixed it into the skillet with the sausage + sauce. I also added a tiny bit of the pasta water. They do that on cooking shows, don’t they? Seemed appropriate.

I let that simmer for another 5 minutes and added the cheese, parsley, and seasoned it with the onion powder, salt and pepper to my taste. I sprinkled more cheese and parsley over the top and put the skillet into the oven for 12-15 minutes, until the cheese bubbled around the edges.

Total time in the kitchen was maybe 30 minutes. And that’s literally it. If you make this, and you definitely should, send me photos, along with your ‘thank yous’ and praises.

Ciao!