Recipe: Linguine with Roasted Cherry Tomatoes and Sausage

If you celebrate Christmas, and your family is anything like mine, by the time Dec. 26 rolls around, you’re ready for a simple meal with little fanfare and perhaps a smaller dining table.

Enter: a short-of sheet-pan pasta dinner. It likely doesn’t taste anything like the holiday fare you’ve been eating for the past few days, but it’s still comforting enough to satisfy on a winter evening.

Most of the cooking is done in a 450-degree oven on a sheet tray filled with a couple pints of cherry tomatoes and 1-inch pieces of Italian sausage (hot and mild are both good here). Within 15 minutes, the tomatoes will burst and the sausage will render its fat and brown, forming something of a sauce with which to coat the pasta.

I like to use pre-made, refrigerated linguine pasta, which you can find in either the deli section or the cheese section of most grocery stores. Feel free to use just about any fresh pasta you can find. Toss it in salted boiling water once the sheet pan comes out of the oven — the pasta will only take a couple of minutes to cook. Drain it and transfer it directly to the sheet pan and let it mingle together with the sauce. (This is, in fact, the only trick; if you cook the pasta too far in advance, it’ll clump up and become difficult to combine with the tomato-sausage mixture.)

To finish, sprinkle everything with a generous half-cup of chopped fresh parsley, plus lemon zest and juice for brightness. I like to serve the dish with a salad on the side, but if you’d rather keep things as easy as possible, the pasta alone will suffice.