Friday 10 March - Fennel and Sausage Ragu with Tagliatelle

This is a recipe from the Rick Stein Long Weekends book, which we've cooked a few times now. As Friday is our busy night, I bought some fresh tagliatelle rather than making it myself. I also make one change to the recipe in the book - instead of using celery, I use chopped up fennel bulb - cooked celery is one of the few things I really dislike.

I've made this before using Italian sausages from Asda, but wasn't able to get them, so I used some good quality sausage meat this time round.

This is quite an unusual way round of doing things, as the first stage is to start frying the sausage meat

Then in with chopped fennel (or celery), onion, garlic, chilli flakes and some fennel seeds

This was cooked for around 15 minutes, and then in with some white wine, which was left to reduce by half

Finally, some chicken stock and cream went in, and it was left to simmer, lid on for around 30 minutes

The first time I made this I had to text my brother who had made it the week before, because to me it looked far too wet, but I was assured that the pasta would suck up the sauce, and it did.

We served in large bowls with some grated parmesan  - absolutely delicious, and one that will be cooked many times in this house.