Spanglish-italiano

Sorry this wasn't uploaded last night, I accidentally strayed on to The Notebook which meant that there was no chance of this being written last night!

I know most of you will be thinking, if you're supposed to be doing something similar to the Julie/Julia project, should you be getting these out of a recipe book? Well yes, but at the same time I think it is nice to share with people tried and tested recipes that can be made easily with what's in the cupboard/fridge/freezer that taste good and aren't horrendously unhealthy. So, this will be a mixture of delights from books, my head and recipes handed down to me.



This particular delight has been adapted from several different places, but essentially it is a sausage and pepper stew, served with pasta. The joy of this is depending on what type of sausage you use, you can get a completely different dish and it also stretches to feed the masses without much hassle. So it's good for an impromptu gathering especially when accompanied by copious amounts of gossip and wine!

This dish comprises of 3 main elements, sausages, tinned tomatoes and peppers. Tonight I used a pack of chorizo flavoured sausages, which lead me down a smoky, spicy full flavoured dish, but I have used Toulouse sausages and added cannellini beans and a bit of streaky bacon to make more of a sausage cassoulet and served with creamy mashed potatoes.

Back to tonight's recipe.

1 pack of 6 Chorizo Sausages
1 Tin of tomatoes
1 Onion, chopped
2 Peppers, sliced, use any sweet peppers, I think it's nice to use orange and yellow as a contrast to the red of the tomatoes
Olive oil
Salt and Pepper
1tsp Smoked Paprika
1tsp Chilli Flakes
Pasta, any shape, tagliatelle works well, but tonight I used Amori

Heat some olive oil in a pan throw in the onion, and saute until soft. With the sausages twist each one in half to make mini sausages and put in the pan to brown.

Once browned add the the paprika and stir through for a couple of minutes, add the peppers and cook for a further 5 minutes.

Add the tinned tomatoes and chilli flakes, put a lid on the pan and leave to on a low heat for 30 mins, this tastes better the longer you leave it, so as long as it isn't drying out (just add a splash of water if it does).

When you are ready to eat, put on a large pan of salted water and bring to the boil add the pasta. Check the seasoning of the sauce and serve, a bit of parmesan and parsley on top is always nice too.

If using different flavoured sausages follow the same idea just experiment with complimentary flavourings.

Enjoy!