Improvised Italian Sausage & Potatoes

When I eat something wonderful in a restaurant but can’t pry the recipe out of the chef, I often jot down some notes about it so I have a shot at recreating it myself. Many of these notes do nothing but accumulate until I or, more often, my husband tosses them as part of a much larger pile of papers. This afternoon I perused some notes I’d made on my iPhone and came across the following list of ingredients from a tapas dish I’d once eaten:

chorizo, red potatoes, red wine, onions, tomatoes, parsley?

I had an image of the dish in my mind, but I couldn’t remember the details. Then I recalled that I had purchased mild Italian sausage at the grocery store yesterday and had red wine and onions. And beautiful red potatoes were in every grocery store now. This was a great opportunity for my own interpretation of the dish, since I couldn’t remember the original perfectly anyway.

I ran to the grocery store for red potatoes and found some baby reds that looked especially good, plus a bunch of fresh Italian parsley.

What I came up with was a sort of hash that resembled the dish we’d had in the tapas restaurant but with a distinctly Italian twist. The verdict: Thumbs up all the way around. So here it is:

Italian Sausage & Potato “Hash”
Serves 4 with leftovers
2T canola oil
1-1/3 lb. Italian sausage (without casings, or remove casings if you purchase sausage links)
1-1/2 lb. baby red potatoes
1 lg onion, diced
1 red and 1 orange bell pepper, diced
3 tomatoes, roughly seeded and chopped
3T red wine (I used a nice Chianti. Save the rest to drink with dinner.)
Salt & pepper (to taste)
2-3T chopped fresh parsley
2 tsp dried Italian herbs or 2T chopped fresh cilantro and basil

Heat large pan over medium heat. Add oil and tilt pan to coat. Add sausage and brown thoroughly.

While the sausage is browning, slice the potatoes in half and place into a microwave-safe dish with about 2T water. Cover and microwave for 5 minutes to steam the potatoes.

When the sausage is browned, add onions and peppers to the pan and sprinkle with salt. Sauté until onions start to become translucent. Remove from pan into a dish, retaining as much oil in the pan as possible, and keep the mixture warm.

Return the pan to the heat. Add potatoes and toss them in the oil. Allow the potatoes to brown, then add tomatoes and wine to the pan and scrape up the bits on the bottom of the pan. Add the sausage mixture back to the pan and mix well. Sprinkle the herbs into the mixture and stir well. Bring everything up to temperature and add salt and pepper to taste. Serve with bread.