DESERT ISLAND MEAL. It's a pretty big deal...

Big Portions Strong Flavours brings you the much acclaimed Sausage Sauce Pasta. A VERY naughty sauce packed full of delicious sausage meat, double cream and red wine. Do not eat this if you are on a diet. Sausage sauce has no time for diets. Only for greedy piggies such as myself and Hannah Weiland - a greedy piggy extroadinaire when it comes to this sauce. Adapted from a River Cafe recipe, Cherry (aka my dad's bird) has changed my whole pasta sauce outlook. Nothing compares. Tasting this sauce is like being slapped round the face with yumminess. Just see for yourselves...

Oh.. and a warning... fights may break out over sausage sauce. There have been many in our family over the years when some of us ate more than their fair share.

"Whenever I know for sure that we will all be together, it is fennel and sausages I buy." Cherry Wellesley, 2011.

Serves 10:

4 glugs of olive oil
20 sausages - Italian pork with a good fennel content is perfect. However you can use any good sausage and add a good spoon of fennel seeds. ALSO if you use 10 Italian sausages and 10 chorizo sausages it is really quite special.
3 small red onions, chopped
4-5 small red dried chillies, crumbled
4 cloves of garlic, chopped
3 Bay leaves
4 sprigs of rosemary, chopped
1/3 bottle of red italian wine
400g tin of peeled plum tomatoes X4
1 grated nutmeg
Parmesan, grated (lots)
Double cream - enough so that the sauce has a creamy quality to it, but not so much so that it dilutes the flavour too much.
Rigatoni

1. Heat the oil in a pan on a medium heat. Skin the sausages and crumble them into the pan.
2. As the sausage fat begins to run add the onions, garlic, chilli, rosemary and bay leaves.
3. Cook on a medium heat for about 30 minutes. Pour in the wine and turn the heat up.
4. Once most of the wine has evaporated add the tinned tomatoes. Simmer gently for 1 hour.
5. Take the sauce off the heat and season with salt, pepper and nutmeg.
6. Add the porky cream and fatty parmesan.

EAT WITH FRIENDS

Make enough to have in a sandwich the next day... if possible it gets even more delicious over night.