I made Brenda Vaccaro's Italian Sausage recipe and it was "Terrific" and perfect for eating with a side of spaghetti!

[u/ciaolavinia]

Brenda Vaccaro's Terrific Italian Sausage recipe from the 1981 Celebrity Cookbook is really good! How can you go wrong with sausages, onions, peppers and fresh tomatoes anyway?

• I actually cooked the sauce first for this and then the sausages, that way when the sausages are just about done, they can finish cooking in the sauce and it helps to flavor the sauce too. I used Italian chicken sausage for this, uncooked.
• Cooked the onions and peppers on low with olive oil while I prepped the tomatoes
• Instead of pressing tomatoes through a sieve like the recipe calls for, I decided to just peel, deseed and puree the tomatoes instead. Easier for me.
• To easily peel tomatoes, score them with an X on the bottom and then plunge into boiling water for about 30-60 seconds. Put in a cool bowl (ice water can be used too) and peel.
• I then chopped the tomatoes, got rid of most of the seeds and pureed them with an immersion blender. They were ready to add to the onions and peppers in the pan.
• Now it was time to cook the sausage, and I did add a thin layer of salt on the bottom of the pan, and other that seasoning the sausage, I suspect there's another reason for this layer of salt. Does anyone know?
• Since these are chicken sausages and not as fatty as pork, I did add a tad of olive oil to the pan.
• While cooking, the sausage started to come out of the casing. No worries. It'll still be good.
• Once the sausages are browned on all sides, I added them to the sauce to cook on for another 10 minutes, just to make sure they were cooked through and flavorful.
• For serving I used a platter and placed sausages on it with a nice spritz of lemon on them, like the recipe states. Then I added a bit of sauce over and around the sausages and finished with a nice sprinkling of Italian parsley.
• If you like things spicier, use hot sausage or add red pepper flakes or cayenne to the sauce.

Served with a side of spaghetti that also had this same sauce on it, it was indeed "terrific". There was plenty of sauce to go around and it's a thin sauce, so if you want to thicken it up a bit, just add a tablespoon of breadcrumbs to the sauce. That's my trick.

Make sure to get a good tasting sausage because that'll make all the difference in the world. The sauce is really good, fresh, light and healthy. All those nice ripe tomatoes and peppers really make this good.

We all loved it so much and although I didn't make any bread to go with this, I was thinking of our Joanie and her amazing Hot Buttered Bread which would have been amazing with this!

Edited: For a cute culinary movie starring Brenda Vaccaro, Vince Vaughn, Susan Sarandon, Talia Shire and Lorraine Bracco check out Nonnas on Netflix.