Italian Sausage and Vegetables

Ingredients:
2 pounds sweet Italian sausage
1 biggish yellow onion
1 green bell pepper
1 red bell pepper
1 bunch broccoli
3 tomatoes
2 cloves garlic
Oregano
Basil
Pasta (I used angel hair, but regretted it. Rotini is the way to go)



Procedure:
Chop the sausage into 1 inch cubes and brown it. At the same time, put on a pot of water and begin to boil the pasta.

While the sausage is cooking, chop all the vegetables into pieces no bigger than 1 inch. Use just the crown of the broccoli, discarding the stalk (or snacking on it while you cook, like I do). Once the sausage starts to brown, add the onion. When the onion is soft add the other vegetables.

As the tomato starts to cook down (you'll be able to tell what I mean if you haven't cooked tomatoes like this before), crush the garlic into the sauce. Add the oregano and basil at the same time.

Serve over the pasta with parmesan cheese. Serves 4.

Tips:
Not too bad. This is a really easy way to make a tomato sauce, though it won't be as thick as your Italian restaurant-style sauce. I added broccoli because it's one of my favorite foods, but if you don't really like broccoli, you should probably leave it out; it doesn't exactly fit with the theme. Also, I got sausage-shaped sausages (you know what I mean), but ground Italian sausage would have been easier to break into pieces, and you wouldn't have the weird wrapper on some of the pieces. Finally, make sure your tomatoes are really ripe. Mine weren't and they didn't break down like I wanted them to. I might start using canned tomatoes (whole peeled) to make sure I don't have that problem in the future.

In all, 3.5/5