Recipe: Eat Your Veggies!

One of my New Years resolutions was to eat and cook more veggies. So far so good, but at only 3 weeks into the new year we are getting pretty sick of the usual carrots and green beans. My cousin Jennifer is a total foodie. I'm talking hard-core. Her shelves are lined with all kinds of recipes and cookbooks and she is always whipping up some tasty treat when we get together. I asked Jen to put together a recipe to share with you guys. Here is what Jennifer said:

This is an easy, cheap and a sneaky way to add veggies into your diet. I had originally used a Rachael Ray recipe as inspiration (called "Christmas Pasta"), but her recipe called for too many different types of meat and it wound up being complicated and expensive to make. This is my easier (and healthier) version. No plagiarism... all of the amounts and ingredients are mine at this point...

Lightened Up Christmas Pasta Sauce

Recipe Serves 4-6
Ingredients:
1 small sweet onion, chopped
3 carrots, peeled and chopped
2 ribs celery, chopped (preferably from the heart)
10 mushrooms, cleaned and quartered
4 cloves garlic, minced
4-5 links chicken sausage removed from casings (any flavor)
2- 28 oz cans of crushed tomatoes
2 cups red wine
Extra virgin olive oil
Salt & pepper to taste
1 Tbsp Trader Joe’s Pasta seasoning blend **
¼ cup fresh parsley, chopped
¼ cup fresh basil, torn into small pieces

Preheat a dutch oven over medium high heat.

Heat 2 tsp. of olive oil in the dutch oven and add the sausage. Cook the chicken sausage until browned, breaking it up into smaller pieces as it cooks. Once browned, remove the sausage with a slotted spoon to a plate covered with a few layers of paper towels. This will help to drain out some of the excess fat from the sausage.

Add the onions, garlic, carrots, celery and mushrooms to the dutch oven. Saute the vegetables in the leftover oil from the sausage until softened and opaque. Add the red wine to the dutch oven and deglaze the pan with the wine. (The red wine will loosen the browned bits of flavor stuck to the bottom of the pan. Working quickly, scrape up all of the browned bits with a wooden spoon to add that flavor into your sauce.) Return the sausage to the pot. Then add the crushed tomatoes and season the sauce with salt, pepper and pasta seasoning blend.

Reduce heat to low and simmer for as long as you can. This sauce benefits from a long cooking time, but will taste delicious if served after only 10 minutes of simmering as well.

Serve over your favorite pasta. Garnish with basil and parsley.

** If you don’t have this on hand you can use 1 tsp oregano, 2 tsp dried basil, and 1 tsp dried parsley instead.

Thanks Jen!