Cheap Bastid Sausage, Pasta & 10 Minute Sauce

If you ever get a chance to watch a cooking show on TV called “Sam the Cooking Guy”, it’s well worth it. Sam Zien is an amateur cook in San Diego who has generated a following over the last several years. He has his own local show, has had one on Discovery Health and has had numerous appearances on the Today show as well.

Sam specializes in cooking simple, minimalist dishes which provide incredible, gourmet flavor but which use common ingredients that you can find in most pantries or fridges. I’ve got a copy of his cookbook, “Just a Bunch of Recipes” and enjoy it. You can also find his stuff on thecookingguy.com.

Today’s Cheap Bastid offering is a variation on something from Sam. He has a simple dish, Italian sausage with peppers and onions which I have taken to the next step. I add some tomato, garlic and spices and then serve it over either spaghetti or cheese grits. Today I’m going to do it with spaghetti.

What I really like about it is that this is a great, 10 minutes spaghetti sauce that has great flavor but without the heaviness of traditional sauce which makes it terrific during the summer. So here goes:

Cheap Bastid’s Sausage, Pasta & 10 Minute Sauce

4 Italian sausages (sweet or spicy—most “spicy” ones aren’t that hot so I add chili flakes to the mix)
3-4 Roma tomatoes
2 cups1 bell pepper--red, green, yellow (cut into 1 ½” strips)
1 cup of onion in strips (cut in strips)
1-2 cloves garlic (to taste)
¼ cup wine or sherry
Salt
Pepper
Basil
Chili flakes
1 lb spaghetti or fettucine

Prep: Cut sausages into 2 inch hunks (note: I like to cut in half lengthwise too—it makes for more “bites” of sausage). Cut peppers & onion into strips and chop the tomatoes. Garlic too if you’re using whole (Cheap Bastid uses chopped garlic in the jar from Gilroy).

Cooking: Get out large skillet and pot for pasta. Heat skillet over medium high and toss in the sausage. Turn heat down just a skosh. Brown the sausage. Put about a half gallon of water in your spaghetti pot and put it on to boil. When cooked remove sausage with slotted spoon reserving the fat.

Salt the spaghetti water and add the pasta. Turn that down just a skosh too. Reheat skillet over medium and put in peppers, onion and garlic. If needed add a tablespoon of cooking oil (canola or olive).


Saute the veggies for 2-3 minutes just until they start to soften then add the tomatoes, salt & pepper, chili flakes and basil. When tomatoes soften put the sausage back in and taste the concoction. Adjust seasonings if needed. Turn heat down to low.


As soon as the pasta is al dente remove it from the heat and drain. Add about a tablespoon of oil to the finished pasta and then put the pasta in the skillet with the sausage and sauce. Mix everything together and serve. (Or you can keep the pasta and sauce separate for individual servings if you want).

This is a nice, tasty, light summery pasta dish. The sauce doesn’t get “heavy”, that’s what I really like about it. It’s all fresh and can be cooked in just a few minutes.

Cheap Bastid Test: How’d this do with a budget? Well, 4 Italian sausages are about a pound and I buy it for $2.29 a pound. The tomatoes are about a pound and they’re $.77 a pound. The peppers cost about $1 and the onion about $.25. Barilla pasta was on special for $1. So, the total for a dinner for 4 or dinner for 2 and lunch for 3 was $5.24. Add a nice salad to this and maybe some garlic toast and you’ve got a feast for about another buck. That’s pretty good! How much would this be at Romano’s Macaroni Grill, Olive Garden or Bucca de Beppa? About $12 to $15 per person?

That’s the Cheap Bastid way! Eat good. Eat cheap. Be grateful.

It's Shake and Bake

“It’s Shake ‘n Bake, and I helped.” God, how I hated that commercial with the little girl proudly presenting a platter of quasi-fried chicken to her Dad at supper time and making that exclamation with a gap-tooth smile and a fake Southern accent. Shake and Bake was supposed to relieve the “homemaker” from the fuss and mess of frying chicken.

Things really haven’t changed. Now Stouffers is running commercials with a little girl straightening her 5th place Tae Kwan Do trophy on the mantel and then practicing her forms in the living room while Mom pops a foil pan of frozen Stouffers lasagna in the oven and fixes a salad all with the voice-over and copy showing on the screen saying “Let’s Fix Dinner”.

And KFC is doing the same thing. It’s billing its bucket and sides combos as a family dinner and as a way to get the whole family together around the table.

I don’t think my Mom ever made Shake ‘n Bake and I know she fried lots of chicken. Rather than going out for pizza in the early 60’s, Mom made Chef Boyardee pizza on a cookie sheet adding water to the dough mix and spreading it out, then trying to make the runny tomato sauce cover the whole thing, slicing a stick of pepperoni as thinly as possible and then covering the whole thing in the little mini can of Kraft Parmesan cheese. It wasn’t good pizza (and frozen didn’t exist) but it was a bit of a treat on Friday night after a long week.

When the Colonel first started advertising, he promoted buckets of chicken fit for the whole family complete with 11 secret herbs and spices. I sure miss those TV commercials which featured the “real” Colonel Harlan Sanders. He could really make a boy’s mouth water in the early 60’s.

I tell you what though, we sure ate more as a family when I was a kid. For one thing, there weren’t the number of restaurants or fast food places then. Even a trip to McDonald’s was a huge treat that I don’t remember happening more than a couple of times growing up. I remember stopping with Dad to pick up Cuban sandwiches a lot more than I ever did anything else.

Now, there’s a fast food joint seemingly on every conceivable corner. There are more franchise restaurants than you can shake a stick at. I remember when it was a huge, big deal that this new steak place called Bonanza came into being (named after the TV show, of course and followed a couple of years later by Ponderosa). We even went a couple of times to Bonanza to slide a tray down the cafeteria type line and come out with an incinerated, gristly t-bone at the other end but it was a new era in “dining”.

I still think that it’s far better to come up with a way to inexpensively and quickly fix a dinner at home. Even if it’s wrapping crescent rolls around hot dogs (what I jokingly refer to as Weiners Wellington) and popping them in the oven while you heat up a can of beans. Let’s get back to simpler ways of doing things.

I’ll grant you, prepping lasagna takes just a bit of doing (about a half hour plus another hour to bake), but it’s worth it. Here’s one that’s simpler, although it’s ziti not lasagna. Just cook a bag of ziti or penne pasta so that it’s al dente. Brown up ¾ to a pound of hamburger or Italian sausage. Then dump that with the cooked pasta (shock the pasta in cold/ice water to stop the cooking). Combine that with a can of spaghetti sauce, 12 ounces of shredded mozzarella, add a bit of basil, oregano, garlic and salt. Mix it up, spread it in a casserole and bake it for a half hour to 45 minutes at 375 and you’ve got Baked Ziti. If you want garlic bread and don’t have any Italian or French bread—substitute hot dog buns. They work great.

Let’s Fix Dinner! Yep that’s a good slogan that Stouffer’s came up with. But let’s do it by doing some pretty quick and simple cooking at home. It just takes a bit of planning.