Sausage ragout

Adam is back on his "I won't eat carbs (except when I feel like it)" thing, so instead of making the linguini and clam sauce I had my mind on set on, I had to come up with something else for the evening. I settled on what I could best describe as a sausage ragout, but I may just be randomly throwing around French culinary terms here. Valentine's dinner will be black bean & tortilla soup with some steak–and lots of Coturri 2002 Zinfandel Sonoma Valley, the favorite wine of ours from the wine tasting course thing that Sheryl gifted me.

But the sausage ragout:

• 4 links spicy Italian sausage


• 1 medium sized eggplant


• 1 zucchini


• 6 largish whitecap mushrooms, or something more interesting


• a few cloves of garlic


• canned crushed tomatoes or tomato sauce


• seasonings (crushed red pepper flakes, black pepper, fresh basil, dry oregano, dill, that sort of thing)


• a loaf of real bread

De-case the sausage and brown it a bit in a 12" chef's skillet. Dice the eggplant, and slice the mushrooms and zucchini fairly thickly. Add the veggies with some olive oil and sauté along with the sausage for a few minutes. Add the tomato substance and some roughly chopped cloves of garlic, along with whatever seasonings you deem fitting. You might need to loosen it up a bit with some water at this point, depending on how much liquid is in with the tomatoes. It should be not really soupy, but not really not really soupy. Let this cook down for ten minutes or so, testing the vegetables to make sure that they're toothsome along the way. Much of the liquid will have boiled out.

If you were smart, you'd have cut up the bread into sandwich sized portions and heated it up in the oven while this real cooking was going on. I ended up serving the ragout over the bread, not really as sandwiches because it was a bit messy, but to be eaten with a knife and fork. I wouldn't completely give up the sandwich idea, though. And yes, bread qualifies as "carbs". No one tell Adam.