Healthy Italian Sausage Recipes

We love this quick skillet meal for busy evenings. The sausage and orzo simmer together in chicken broth, resulting in a creamy, risotto-like dish in under 30 minutes.

This easy to make, comforting dish will keep you warm on a cold day.

Convenient fully cooked chicken sausage is a great flavor starter for this easy pasta recipe with just three ingredients you can keep stocked in your freezer or pantry for fast dinners. Just add some sautéed onions and pasta and you have a super-simple meal that the entire family will love.

Colorful peppers and tomatoes and sweet onion make this sausage dinner pop with fresh flavor. Roasting instead of sautéing makes this even easier for a busy weeknight.

For a fast weeknight pasta dinner, why not cook your sauce and pasta all at once? By using the exact amount of water you need to cook the pasta--no colanders here--the starch that cooks off into your pasta water, which you usually drain away, stays in the pot, giving you delectably creamy results.

This satisfying and hearty soup has all the flavors of lasagna, but without the fuss of layering ingredients in a baking dish and waiting for the lasagna to bake. Here, we take advantage of the multicooker to prepare a soup that is ready in 10 minutes. Just top the soup with ricotta and Parmesan and enjoy!

These meatballs are flavor-packed--thanks to a little sausage added to the ground chicken mix--and all-purpose: serve them with spaghetti for a healthy dinner, on a toothpick with dipping sauce as an easy appetizer or stir them into a soup to make it more satisfying.

This healthy broccoli rabe and turkey sausage lasagna recipe has plenty of vegetables and goes light on sausage, so it's lower in fat and calories than traditional lasagna recipes. The recipe makes enough for two 8-by-8-inch casseroles (four servings each)--have one for dinner tonight and freeze the other for a night when you don't have time to make dinner. Or, feel free to make one larger lasagna (in a 9-by-13-inch pan) instead of two smaller ones; just increase the cooking time a bit for the larger pan size.

Some like it hot--but if you don't, sweet Italian turkey sausage is also delicious in this healthy gnocchi recipe. Serve with a mixed green salad with sherry vinaigrette.

Adding a bright parsley-tarragon vinaigrette brings fresh flair to sausage and peppers. Serve with some crusty bread to sop it all up.

Total happiness in a bowl: pasta, sausage, tomatoes and herbs. The tomatoes get sweet and tender and turn into sauce with the stock and the pasta. Without ever adding any butter, the spaghetti sauce is rich and silky. Adding the herbs at the end gives the dish a fresh pop of color and flavor. This is one healthy pasta recipe we can definitely get behind!

Mushrooms have the perfect meaty texture to complement a modest amount of spicy Italian sausage in this baked rigatoni that has less than one-quarter the fat of the original. Whole-wheat pasta rather than white pasta makes our version a fiber powerhouse with 7 grams per serving. This delicious and cheesy pasta casserole freezes well so you might want to make an extra to have on hand for a ready-to-heat-and-eat meal.