Medium Shelled Pasta with Sausage and Parmesan

Hi lovely baking and cooking friends! Got another great weeknight dinner recipe for you. I found it on this website: justusfourblog.com. We cut the original recipe in half - there’s just two of us - and made a few small tweaks. This dish was so satisfying, and required very little ingredients that we didn’t already have on hand. I mean come on, don't you just want to shove your face right into this bowl?!

What You’ll Need:
2 cups of medium shells pasta (we usually do 1 cup per person)
1/2 lb of ground Italian sausage (we froze the other 1/2 - we bought the parsley and cheese sausage)
3 cloves of garlic, thinly sliced
salt
fresh ground black pepper
fresh parmesan cheese

How to:
1) Heat a large pot of water over high heat and bring to boil. Generously salt the water and cook the pasta according to directions on the box. Drain pasta, reserving 1/4 cup of the pasta water.

2) In a large skillet, brown the Italian sausage, breaking up with a spoon while it cooks. Remove from pan with a slotted spoon and set aside. Do not drain the sausage drippings.

3) In the same skillet, saute the garlic slices over medium heat until lightly browned. Remove from skillet and set aside with sausage.

4) Add pasta, reserved pasta water, sausage and garlic to the pan and cook for 5 minutes. Transfer to serving bowl and top with shaved parmesan and fresh ground black pepper.

Simple and quick to make, and it has GREAT flavor. A good alternative to having pasta and meatballs to switch it up a bit. A tip - don't skip out on saving some of the pasta water. Otherwise, it will be dry.

Hope you guys enjoyed, thanks for reading!!