Pasta with Sausage and Arugula

This dish has been one of the most flavorful dishes I've had in some time. With a variety of ingredients, each bite has unique tastes and textures that never get boring from the start of the meal to the last bite on the plate.
This recipe is based on Fettuccine with Sausage and Arugula from the WeightWatcher's book Stir It Up: Super Skillet Cookbook but naturally, I changed things up to meet my own personal cooking desires.

First, I got a large pot of water on to boil. You'll want to prepare 8 oz pasta. There's a new kind of Barilla Piccolini pastas on the shelf that are rich in fiber and whole grains if you want to go that route without getting wheat pasta, of which I am not a fan. In this recipe I used mini Rotini. The recipe out of the book calls for fettuccini, but I honestly think that would be the wrong pasta choice for this dish. I think it would be clumsy on the fork and it would difficult to get a mixed bite of the other ingredients.

Next, I removed the meat from the casings of 2 Italian turkey sausages. You can probably use spicy if you want. Begin to brown and crumble this in a large skillet. When the sausage is browned (you'll want it slightly undercooked), remove it from the skillet onto a separate plate.

Heat oil in the skillet and add mushrooms, onions, and garlic. Cook this, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes. The mushrooms will release their moisture and then reabsorb it with the flavors of the onions and garlic. Mmmmmm.

Add cannellini, chicken broth, the browned sausage and in the recipe it says to add arugula. From previous experience, my family and I decided we didn't like arugula cooked into a recipe, so I skipped adding the arugula at this step and I'll show you what I did with it instead later on. Bring this to a boil, reduce heat and cover, simmer for a few minutes. The sausage will finish cooking as the flavors begin to marry.

Stir in tomato, basil - I used fresh basil leaves from the garden - oh man! and a bit of black pepper. LEt this get nice and heated up and cook for just a couple of minutes. In the meantime I prepared the plates...

Instead of putting the arugula in the pot to be cooked back on step 3, I decide to put it at the bottom of the bowl to act as a bed for the dish. My pasta was already finished and drained, so I topped the arugula with past, and you can top this with the sausage mix.

I anticipated that the heat from the sausage mix would heat the arugula enough to be nice and warm, but not enough to make it wilted, mushy, or to me sometimes heated arugula can be overly bitter. This turned out perfect. The arugula was warmed from the juice of the sausage mix but still provided a crisp bite on the fork. It added a fantastic texture to the dish.

I can't stress enough how awesome this was. The beans and the cheese together, the pasta beans and cheese, the freshness of the tomato, the arugula salad bed below sneaking onto the fork, and the kicker was the punch of flavor the Italian sausage and fresh basil provided. I can't wait to eat this again, and I hope you try it at home.