Roasted Fennel and Sausage Spaghetti

This meal was made from my mistake of packing everything in my kitchen except one pot and one roasting tray amidst moving flats a few years ago. It’s a two-step sauce, the fennel gets sweet and caramelised as the sausages crisp up and sizzle in the oven before you add in tomatoes to reduce. Boil a big pot of spaghetti and use tongs to toss it through the sauce in the roasting tray with all the collected pasta water that comes with it. It's so easy that when I made it last night I had a bath between putting the sausages in the oven and boiling the pasta - sometimes I think that's the goal of all recipes I write.

Ingredients

• 400g of Italian fennel sausages

• A bulb of fennel, finely sliced

• A small brown onion, finely sliced

• A few cloves of garlic, roughly chopped

• 1 tsp of dried chilli flakes

• 400ml of passata or tinned chopped tomatoes

• A handful of fresh basil

• 250g of spaghetti
  

Turn your oven to 200 degrees. Take the skins off the sausages and break them up into bite-sized pieces and place on the bottom of a high-sided baking tray. Put into the oven to roast for 20 minutes so the sausage crisps up and the fat is rendered.

Spoon off some of the fat from the sausages and add the fennel, onion, garlic and chilli flakes into the tray and roast for another 20 minutes until everything is close to golden and the flesh of the fennel is tender. Pour over the passata and a splash of water and place the tray back into the oven for around 20 minutes until the liquid from the tomatoes is reduced and everything has deepened in colour.

Taste it and see if you want to season it more as the sausages will likely be quite salty. Take it out of the oven and let cool slightly. Cook your spaghetti and once ready pull it out of the water with tongs making sure to bring lots of pasta water with it. Toss the spaghetti and all the good stuff in the roasting tin together. Completely cover in parmesan and eat immediately.