#2: American Chop Suey with Spicy Sausage

Perhaps you aren’t feeling like cooking with quite so many ingredients as the last recipe. No worries, you can still whip up a delicious pasta dish in no time. Here’s one that I learned from my mother, with a few twists. This will serve 4, but it’s also one of those dishes that is almost better reheated, so don’t cut the recipe down if you’re only cooking for 1 or 2.

Ingredients

• 1 small onion, minced
• 1 pound of hot sausage links (typically 6-8 links) (You could also use sweet sausage or ground beef (ideally 85% lean)
• 1 pound dry elbow macaroni
• 1 can (10.75 oz) condensed tomato soup
• 2 cups pasta sauce
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ¼ teaspoon black pepper
• ⅓ cup parmesan cheese

Directions

First up, get a large pot of water to boil for the pasta. Now we need to get the sausage meat out of the sausage links. I’m using hot sausage which is nice and spicy, because that’s the way I like it. If you’re using ground beef though you shouldn’t need to do this step. Place the links on a cutting board and using a paring knife to score one side. Don’t cut it all the way through, just score them.

Then, using your fingers (wash your hands!), carefully pull the casing off of the sausage exposing the meat. That’s the casing on the bottom left. Discard the casing and place the sausage into a saucepot.

A saucepot is wide like a skillet, but deep like a shallow pot. Place the sausage meat into the saucepot and break it up using a wooden spatula. I’m not cooking with onion because my fiance finds the flavor of onion way too strong, but if you were using onion, you would want to cook it with the sausage meat. After about 10 minutes of cooking, it should hopefully soften somewhat and get a little bit brown. You don’t need to put any oil in the pan, the fat located in the sausage meat will provide all the oil you need.

At this point, your water is hopefully boiling. Salt the water liberally and then dump your pasta into the water and cook according to package directions. For me, half a pound of elbows (half a box, typically) was about three cups of pasta.

Cook the sausage over medium heat for about 9-10 minutes, which should hopefully be just as long as your pasta takes to cook. Make sure to keep breaking the sausage up as it cooks into tiny little bits. When it’s browned, it’s ready. Don’t cook it until it’s burned, just make sure there’s no pink or red. If it finishes ahead of the pasta, remove from the heat and let it sit.

 

Unless you have a very fatty sausage, you shouldn’t need to drain it, but if there’s a lot of fat there, drain some (but not all!) of it out. Fat is flavor, after all! At this point your pasta should be done, so drain it in a colander. Now it’s time to marry everything together. Place the skillet with the sausage over medium heat and add the pasta.

Next, add the tomato sauce. I prefer to use a plain tomato sauce, but if you’re feeling frisky you can add a tomato-basil or a mushroom sauce if you want. Then it’s time for the secret ingredient!

Yup! One can of condensed tomato soup. It’s amazing how much tomato flavor is in the condensed soup, and it also adds a great thickness to the sauce. Now’s the time to add your salt and pepper and stir everything together until it’s well-combined.

Now, you COULD eat it now, but you should let it get even better! Cover the saucepot and let it simmer over medium heat for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally so nothing sticks to the bottom and burns. This will cook some of the excess water out and thicken everything nicely. When the 15 minutes are up, remove the chop suey from the eat and stir the parmesan cheese in. This will further help to bind everything together. Once it’s combined, it’s ready to serve!

And be sure to save some of this for leftovers. Like I said, it reheats extremely well. Just be sure to sprinkle a little bit of water onto it when you microwave it so that it doesn’t dry out! This one cooks up in just about 30 minutes, so it’s perfect for a quick weeknight dinner.