divine angst

I come from a big, ethnic family. We eat a lot of pasta with red sauce. I therefore make a mean red sauce. We also love things like sausage and peppers, though we never ate it at home, so I never learned to make this delicacy. Not long ago, Mr. Angst and I found a great restaurant and we had sausage and peppers there that were To. Die. For. So I decided I’d try and finally learn to make this dish myself. Here, my dear readers, is the FABULOUS result:

Sausage and Peppers, a la Kristine

2 tbsp olive oil
3 peppers, pick your color (I don’t like green, so I used 1 each red, yellow, and orange), seeded and cut into 1-inch strips
2 thin slices onion, quartered (so, cut your onion across the middle, then cut two thin slices, like you wanted to make onion rings, and then cut those slices crosswise in an X so you have nice thin strips of onion)
1 tsp. red pepper flake
pinch salt
freshly ground black pepper
1-2 tsp. minced garlic
1 package hot turkey Italian sausage
1/2 cup to 3/4 cup chicken, veggie, or beef broth
1/4 cup to 1/3 cup white wine
1 tsp. dried basil
2 tsp. dried oregano

Heat olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat until almost smoking. Add onions to pan and saute. DO NOT let them fry; you want them soft but not burned or crispy. After two or so minutes, add the peppers, skin side down. Try and get all the peppers into contact with the pan, to promote browning.

WALK AWAY, for at least 3 minutes. Do not fiddle with the peppers or they won’t brown and you will lose oodles of delicious flavor. Go ahead and add the salt, pepper, and red pepper flake. If you want to shake the pan some to get the seasonings down into the oil, that’s fine. But try not to move the peppers too much!

When the peppers begin to get soft and they are nicely browned, toss in the garlic. Stir the garlic into the onion and pepper mix. Don’t let it get too brown—burned garlic is bitter. When the garlic has softened, scoot the whole mixture out to the edges of the pan. Put the sausages, whole, in the hot center of the pan and, again, WALK AWAY. Turkey sausage, because of its low fat content, doesn’t have as much flavor, so the browning really helps to maximize the goodness of the whole dish.

As the sausage browns, turn it so that each link gets a chance to brown all over. Once the sausages are nice and browned, add the liquids and let them come up to a hearty simmer. Add the oregano and basil, stir into the mixture, and let it come back up to simmer. Cover the skillet for about five minutes.

When you uncover the pan, stir the contents around. The liquids should have come together into a slightly thick, murky broth.

Serve the sausages on pasta and cover with the broth. Be careful when you cut into the sausages—they might squirt. Devour with nice red wine and feel good about how healthy the meal was! Think about it—regular sausage and peppers are FULL of saturated fat and cholesterol and other bad things. But the low-fat turkey sausage, while definitely lacking in the texture department, has tons of flavor with hardly any fat at all.