March 31, 2007
Italian Sausage, Peppers, and Onions
The extended family will gather to celebrate Easter a week late, due to work schedules as usual. This year we will be driving to the foster niece's place and our assignment is to bring Italian sausage and potatoes as well as the pies. Two experiments with aug rotten potatoes haven't yielded a winner yet, but the wee wifey found this sausage recipe online, and adapted it per the posted comments and her impeccable judgement. The two of us finished the entire test batch, supposedly twelve servings, in one afternoon, and I scraped the pot for the last of the sauce. I don't know if it was the thoretical solvent effect of the beer, but those sausages were pretty close to the melt in your mouth stage.
12 links fresh hot Italian sausage, 2-1//2 lbs.
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 red onions, sliced
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 green bell pepper, sliced
2 teaspoons Italian seasoning
1/2 bottle beer
Place the sausage in a Dutch oven over medium heat, and brown on all sides. Remove from the pot, and slice.
Heat the olive oil in the Dutch oven. With a wooden spoon, scrape any lingering sausage griznits into the oil. Stir in the onion and garlic, and cook 2 to 3 minutes. Stir in the beer, peppers and Italian seasoning. Add the the sliced sausage, reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer for forty five minutes.
There are a few detail changes we plan for next time which we expect will make the dish still better. Aldi's sells, at least around here, a package with three bell peppers, one each in red, yellow and green. Adding these after half an hour of simmering is done will let the onions carmalize while preserving the some of the color and texture of the peppers. If anyone has a good price on sliced portobello mushrooms, we just might add some of them at the same time. The heat of the hot sausages dissipated to just a tingle, which will be plenty for this crowd, but for more adventuresome palates some crushed red peppers added early or a healthy splash of hot sauce added later would not be amiss.
Update:
The multicolored peppers, cut into chunks and added toward the end cooked up nicely and added a touch of color. The sliced baby bellas added at the same time faded into the background but added a nice texture to the sauce.
The wee wifey made enough this time, in combination with pasta and meatballs our hostess provided, that I had a chance to see who well leftovers microwave. Quite nicely, thank you.
Posted by triticale at March 31, 2007 07:21 AM | TrackBack