Decided to take out the Italian in me tonight and whip up some classic sausage, peppers, and onions to be served on a hoagie-sized roll. It was a very simple meal that took just about fifteen-to-twenty minutes to cook. Now, before I get to the recipe I just want to give you a few side notes.

• We like our vegetables chopped fine whenever we’re making a meal like this. To us, there’s nothing worse than getting a huge piece of onion in your mouth. We love the taste of onion; we just don’t typically like chewing large pieces of onion. McDonald’s sized chopped onions is perfect for us. This same line of thinking applies to the peppers in this recipe. With this being said, feel free to chop (or don’t chop) your vegetables the way you feel they should be.
• We also like our peppers slightly raw, so we added the peppers in the pan just before we were ready to eat.
• We bought chop-meat style sweet italian sausage. We HATE biting into huge pieces of sausage (shut up, perverts) when they’re in our sandwich. So we cooked the sausage sort of like taco meat — loose and all over the place. Again, feel free to cook the sausage the way you like it.

So the ingredients? I’m assuming, with the left overs that we currently have, this all will feed about four to five 10″ hoagie rolls.

• 1lb ground sweet italian sausage
• enough olive oil to just coat the pan you’re cooking the sausage in
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 1 medium sized yellow onion (substitute, or add, your favorite kind of onion), chopped into small cubes
• 1 large green bell pepper (substitute, or add, your favorite kind of pepper), chopped into small cubes
• pinches of salt and black pepper

As for the cooking approach, pretty straight forward.

1. Pour olive oil in to pan and let it sit over medium heat for a minute or two — just enough so it’s hot.
2. Place sausage meat in pan until the entire thing is brown. Break apart the sausage in to smaller pieces with a fork. Once brown, drain the liquid and then set the meat aside till we’re ready to eat. If you like your sausage in links, then cut them down the middle long ways and cook until both sides are brown.
3. Melt the butter in the pan, over medium heat, until it’s white and slightly foamy.
4. Stir in the chopped onion. Sprinkle as much salt and pepper as your little heart desires. Cook, and continue to stir, the onion until it’s slightly translucent and tender — we’re sweating these bad boys for ultimate flavor (or something). If you like your peppers tender, then mix in both the onion and the pepper.
5. Stir in the pepper and continuously stir for a good three to four minutes. We like the crispiness of bell peppers, so we didn’t let them cook all that much.
6. Toast that roll if that’s your thing.

Now at this point, you can either mix the sausage meat with the peppers+onion mix or just build your sandwich ingredient by ingredient. I left the meat separate from the vegetables so we could apply as much as one as we like.

I also used some jar pasta sauce as a little extra kick to our sausage, peppers, and onions sandwich. If you don’t like sauce with such a meal, then leave it out. I think next time I might try some pizza sauce — you know, make it more Jersey boardwalk style.

So build up that roll with the cooked ingredients and you’re good to go. Pretty simple, eh? You didn’t even need a recipe for this bad boy. I’ve just been watching way too much food network and thus wanted to share my creation.

I was asked by Shangning.net to respond to a ‘blog question game.’  While I don’t normally participate in these sort of things,  I figured I won’t be such a Grinch this year.  However, I’m responding on my terms, which is just responding to one of the questions.  The one question is, “What sort of food would you like best?”  I won’t be asking any of you, in specific, to do this on your site, but if you’re reading this and want to do it, then head on over to shangning.net to see the rules and the rest of questions (holy run-on sentence, Batman).

First, I love food (who doesn’t), so this is actually quite hard to answer.  Growing up, I loved a meal my mother would make quite often — chicken cutlets, mashed potatos, and corn.  This was a comfort meal for me, and still is to this day.  It certainly helps me recall many fond memories growing up.  Especially the many times of running in from playing outside to eat dinner, shove dinner down my throat only to then run back outside again to play. 

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