Food with My Dude #12: Italian Sausage and Peppers

About a month ago, we tried a completely new meal that was similar to our Orecchiette Pasta, but minus the noodles and addition of some new ingredients and herbs. It’s called, plain and simply, Italian Sausage and Peppers. We wanted to find a new sausage recipe, so we decided to give this one a try!

I found the recipe on the Girl Who Ate Everything blog. You’ll need:

• 1 tablespoon olive oil
• 20 ounces sweet or hot Italian sausages 
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 large yellow sweet onion, sliced 2 small yellow onions
• 1 red bell peppers, seeded and sliced
• 1 green bell peppers, seeded and sliced
• 4 cloves garlic minced 1 1/2- 2 teaspoons of garlic
• 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1/2 teaspoon dried basil (or 1 tablespoon fresh basil)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 1 cup chicken broth or white cooking wine
• 1 (14 ounce) diced tomatoes, drained

Price:

The only things we had to buy were the hot Italian sausages and the peppers. As you can see, we made a few minor changes from the original recipe. We don’t particularly like tomatoes in some foods, so we just omitted those.

The Cooking Process

So, the original recipe called for sausage links, but since we always buy ground Italian sausage, [because it’s neater and reduces time] we just broke up the pieces to be a decent size amount for each bite. We let this cook for around 5-8 minutes. The sausage was supposed to be cooked just lightly enough to where it was all the way cooked, but I let it cook a bit longer just because the sausage pieces were large.

All I had to do was cut up the two green peppers that I used, just because I didn’t buy red ones the last time I went shopping. The onions didn’t take me forever to cut since they just had to be cut long ways into thin slices rather than diced! I will say that I’m getting faster at cutting an onion, go me!

Once the sausage finished cooking, I set it aside in a bowl while the veggies cooked. The veggie combo looks delicious already, yum.

After a few minutes of the veggies cooking, I then returned the sausage to the skillet, as well as add the chicken broth, basil, garlic, and oregano. The recipe said for only 1/4 cup of chicken broth, not really sure why, but since I already had a cup of chicken broth frozen, I used that much. No need to have a random portion of chicken broth, nope. It was slightly more liquid-y, but I figured that it would turn out better that way and the sausage could absorb the broth and have more flavor.

I let that cook for a few more minutes, and that’s really all it is!

Here’s the final product:

Taste: Such an easy and flavorful recipe. I think I made the right call to have the extra chicken broth in. The longer I let the mixture cook, the sausage especially was able to soak up the broth and stay super juicy! What really made this recipe stand out was the oregano because I could distinctly taste it as it mixed with everything else.

Rating:

Heat level:

I love the spiciness of Italian sausage in this dish. You can certainly use just mild sausage if you aren’t a fan of spiciness — no judgment here, [you crazy person! Kidding.]

We wanted to just try this meal plain, but the next time, we will cook it with rice. That’ll be so good because there was some extra broth in the skillet, so the rice will soak up that up to make it even better!

This was a super fun and easy recipe that gave us a little more variety to add to our meals. I think it was mainly fun to cut up all the veggies, haha. We’ll definitely make this one of our staple recipes because it was so quick and we usually have the ingredients.

Would you try this meal with hot Italian sausage or do you want to keep it on a sweeter side?

Hope you are having a wonderful week once again!