Farfalle with Italian Sausage and Tuscan Kale

Hospice has begun. A nurse named Patricia comes every morning at nine. She is Black, she is kind, she is efficient, and she calls Mama "Miss Brenda" with the kind of respect that suggests she has been caring for Southern women her entire career. Mama likes her. Mama likes very few people immediately, so Patricia must be exceptional. On her second visit, Patricia asked Mama what she wanted, and Mama said, "I want my kitchen to smell like garlic." Patricia looked at me. I started cooking.

The house has changed. It's quieter in a way that has nothing to do with volume. The TV is still on. Curtis still watches the news. Marcus and Jasmine still bicker. But there's a hush underneath — the particular silence of a house that is waiting for something it doesn't want. The hospice bed is in the living room because Mama refused the bedroom. "I want to see people," she said. "I want to hear the kitchen." So the hospital bed sits where the couch used to be, facing the kitchen doorway, and when I cook she can hear the sizzle and smell the garlic and I talk to her from the stove the way I talked to her from the step stool thirty years ago.

I cook Mama's favorite meals in rotation. Fried chicken — she eats a few bites. Peach cobbler — she eats a spoonful. Collard greens — she drinks the pot liquor from a cup because it's easier to swallow than the greens themselves. Each meal is a conversation, a memory, a holding. I make the food and bring it to her and she tastes it and we talk about the seasoning and we are both pretending that this is normal and we both know it isn't and the pretending is its own kind of grace.

Jasmine has become Mama's companion. After school, she goes straight to the hospital bed and sits beside it and does her homework while Mama sleeps. Sometimes Mama wakes up and they talk. Sometimes Jasmine reads to her. Sometimes they just sit. My nine-year-old daughter is learning about death and love and presence in real time, and she is handling it with a maturity that I did not have at thirty-six. She is her grandmother's granddaughter — strong and quiet and there.

Marcus is angry. Not at Mama. Not at God. At the cancer — at the unfairness of it, the randomness. He asked me Tuesday night, "Why her?" I said, "I don't know, baby." He said, "That's not good enough." I said, "I know. It's what I have." He went to his room. He came out an hour later and asked if he could help me cook. We made jambalaya together — sausage, shrimp, rice, the whole house filling with Cajun spice — and he stirred the pot without talking and I stood next to him without talking and the silence between a mother and son in a kitchen is its own kind of answer, even when there isn't one.

The jambalaya Marcus and I made that Tuesday night is the meal I keep turning over in my mind — the way he stirred without speaking, the way the Cajun spice filled the whole house and reached Mama in her hospital bed by the living room doorway. We don’t always have andouille on hand, but we always seem to have Italian sausage and a bunch of Tuscan kale, and this farfalle has become our stand-in: the same kind of one-pot, stir-it-together, don’t-have-to-talk meal that lets two people share a kitchen when words are too heavy to carry. If you’re feeding a family through something hard, this is the pot to put on the stove.

Prep Time: 10 minutes | Cook Time: 25 minutes | Total Time: 35 minutes | Servings: 6

Ingredients

12 oz farfalle (bow-tie) pasta
1 lb Italian sausage (mild or hot), casings removed
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1 (14.5 oz) can diced tomatoes, undrained
1/2 cup low-sodium chicken broth
1 large bunch Tuscan (lacinato) kale, stems removed, leaves roughly chopped
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese, plus more for serving
Salt and black pepper to taste

Instructions

Cook the pasta. Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil. Cook farfalle according to package directions until al dente. Reserve 1/2 cup pasta water, then drain and set aside.
Brown the sausage. In a large deep skillet or Dutch oven, heat olive oil over medium-high heat. Add the sausage and cook, breaking it into crumbles, until browned and cooked through, about 6–8 minutes. Transfer to a plate, leaving the drippings in the pan.
Sauté the aromatics. Reduce heat to medium. Add the onion to the skillet and cook until softened, about 4 minutes. Add the garlic and red pepper flakes and cook 1 minute more, stirring constantly.
Build the sauce. Add the diced tomatoes and chicken broth. Stir to combine, scraping up any browned bits from the bottom of the pan. Simmer for 5 minutes until slightly reduced.
Wilt the kale. Add the chopped kale in batches, stirring each addition until wilted before adding more. Cook until all the kale is tender, about 4–5 minutes.
Finish the dish. Return the sausage to the pan. Stir in the heavy cream and bring to a gentle simmer. Add the cooked pasta and toss to coat. If the sauce is too thick, add reserved pasta water a splash at a time. Remove from heat and stir in Parmesan.
Season and serve. Taste and adjust salt and pepper. Serve immediately with extra Parmesan at the table.

Nutrition (per serving)

Farfalle with Italian Sausage and Tuscan Kale — The Pot We Stirred When Words Ran Out