Sage Lamb Merguez Pasta Mancini

Great ingredients are the key to a great meal.   I am a firm believer in that and I think any good chef/cook is as well.  Luckily I live a few blocks away from a GREAT ingredient spot...BKLYN Larder.  The Brooklyn Larder has an amazing selection of meat, cheeses, honeys, chocolate, olive oil and other such goodies.   My favorite part of shopping there is the staff but I will follow up with a formal review of them once I cycle through the posts I write with some of their ingredients I picked up yesterday.

So one of the ingredients that I began to design a meal around was their Lamb Merguez.   Now a merguez sausage is quite the little flavorful treat.   I call it my middle eastern chorizo hehe :)  Now the lamb merguez has a very dominant flavor so I didnt need much else but what I chose had to bring additional flavor to the dish and soak up all the delicious juice from the cooked merguez meat.    

I decided to make a pasta with the lamb merguez.   I got some shallots and fresh sage to sautee with the uncased lamb merguez.   The pasta I used I also got at BKLYN larder, Pasta Mancini.  I Boiled up the pasta to just shy of al dente.  I then toss some freshly cut vine ripened tomatos, and italian parley.  I mixed that with the sauteed lamb merguez and then tossed in the pasta to finish them cooking and get the starch to soak up all the lamby goodness.   

I finished it with some parmesan reggiano and served it up.    How did it turn out?   One word.  YUM.  This was an amazing and simple dish.   100% recommend you trying this one at home.   You dont need a lot when you have good quality ingredients.

I took a shot of the uncased Lamb Merguez:

To be clear when I say uncase I mean I cut the sausage down the middle and remove the outer casing so I can just use the spiced and ground up meat.  YUM

Here is the pic of the final dish:

YUM YUM LAMB MERGUEZ!