Fettuccine with Smashed Peas, Sausage & Ricotta Cheese

This is our first “tag team” blog entry. I had a massage at 5:00 Monday evening (ahhh!), so I prepped all of the ingredients for Ben to put this dish together, which he managed to do while wrangling a four year old and a three month old... no small feat!

To me, this is a perfect example of a recipe that looks amazing on paper and is ho-hum in reality. Nothing wrong with it, necessarily, except perhaps a lack of cohesion. Ben and I both had problems articulating what was wrong aside from the fact that the flavors never meshed.

We had to laugh, because before this blog project, we would have given this recipe a four or five. Now, our standards seem permanently elevated and a perfectly fine dinner gets an average rating. Kind of puts the pressure on for years to come, no? We’ve decided, also, that we need to standardize the rating system a bit, so look for that in a future post. Can’t live without a rubric! I guess once a teacher, always a teacher.

For the sauce, you sauté garlic and Italian sausage, then add peas and smash them with the back of your spoon or with a potato masher. One note: the recipe calls for hot Italian sausage, but I used Boulder Sausage’s mild Italian sausage in lieu of hot in the interest of Sophia’s and my palates. I’m not convinced that the added heat would have added much to improve the dish.

You then stir in ricotta cheese and chopped fresh basil and some Pecorino Romano and toss with the pasta and some pasta water. Easy enough, and certainly very flavorful. The smashed peas and basil give the pasta a rather lovely springy green color and flavor, and the sausage is yummy in its own right. But, somehow, none of it goes together. Our feeling is that it’s a good basic recipe, but that we might play around a bit with the meat and might add a bit of grated lemon zest to complement the peas and basil. 

Fine, but not too exciting. Of course, it had peas, sausage and basil, three of Sophia’s favorites, so she gave it five stars. We’re saying three. I think we’ll move on to some of Giada’s other offerings another time, but likely won’t return to this, at least as written.