Campanelle Pasta With Sausage And Green Olives

I love to play around with pasta.  Pasta is neutral in flavor, with limitless potential.  The best pasta I have ever had was in Italy and it was incredibly simple. The life-changing dish had only three ingredients. And it was dirt cheap. And although this trip was many moons ago with my husband, well before we were married, I remember it vividly.

It was an incredible trip all around. We were young, without much money, exploring this amazing country freely. We traveled all over Italy and spent countless hours driving through the countryside. It was on our way to the quaint town of Montalcino when we had one of the best meals of our lives.

We ate at a lovely, small family-run restaurant that for the life of me I can’t recall the name of.  It was nondescript and run-down, but with a killer view that overlooked the rolling Italian countryside.  We were not given a menu, (I don’t think they had any) as there was not much to choose from.  Homemade pasta with olive oil and shaved black truffles was one of two daily offerings. I ordered it. And it was incredible. I don’t think I need to tell you why.

The takeaway from this remarkable meal is that simple pasta dishes are often better than the more complicated ones. At least in my opinion.  This campanile pasta with sausage and green olives is a rustic pasta recipe with some simple ingredients that just work well together. In this dish, I use a good quality campanelle pasta, which means “bellflowers or little bells” in Italian, because its sturdy ruffles cone shape is strong enough to hold up against the more predominant flavor of chicken sausage.

Briny green olives and radicchio add to the true earthiness of the dish which is all brought together by the wine and chicken stock reduction.  This is not the truffle pasta dish I had in Italy all these years ago, but it is inspired by the simplicity of that dish I so fondly remember.