Cavatappi with Sausage and Lima Beans

This is getting to be a fairly old picture, but it's another of those sort of unattractive things that tasted good and I always seem to have the most problems updating when I've made something quite ugly. It sort of visually reminds me of pasta salads at church potlucks when I was a kid, minus all the sour cream and/or mayonnaise.

This is actually a pasta take on a Gordon Ramsay recipe from his book Fast Food. I had been wanting to make soup and there was a recipe for a chorizo, red onion, and lima bean soup. I didn't have any chorizo (and have never had it - I've never seen it available anywhere here, though I've also never gone looking in speciality stores), but I did have some turkey sausage (with feta cheese and spinach) in the freezer, which needed either to be eaten or thrown out. (Getting freezer burned.) And I had lima beans! And red onion!

Alas. I had less than 1/3 the amount of lima beans needed to make even half the recipe and I didn't want to try it out when I was so obviously short on one of the main ingredients. So I thought... why not take out the soup and put in some pasta? So this is the same basic thing, just with significantly smaller amounts of vegetables and meat, and a bit of pasta to plump it up to meal size. I kept all the same seasonings and added only Parmesan cheese.

It was a nice meal. But what it really made me want was soup instead. Some other day, I suppose, when I've got lima beans again.