Okay, so I made the thing. I'm not sure if I mentioned this is an Italian kinda comfort food meal? But yeah I made it just a tiny bit different from how I told y'all to make it because I DO WHAT I WANT. Actually I wanted you to see that you can easily change up what you're doing when you cook something like this. Anyway, pics.



Ingredients. You got sausage, peppers, potatoes, tomatoes, onion, garlic, some homemade cherry wine that I'm substituting for balsamic vinegar because we RAN OUT oh the humanity and then you have your herbs and spices, basil, fennel, anise seeds, and salt.



Sausage in the frying pan, potatoes in the pot to boil. Sausage is on 3/10 heat, potatoes are at like 7/10 heat.



This is how they look once they're done.



This is what you do while you're waiting for the sausages and potatoes to be done. If the sausages and potatoes finish cooking first, turn off the heat! Put the sausages on a plate to cool cause we're gonna use that frying pan, and drain the taters so they don't get mushy and gross. But yeah, while they're cooking, you chop all the things. And these are in order of how they go into the frying pan-- onions first, then garlic, then tomatoes, then peppers.



A war happened while I was cooking. The result was an uneasy stalemate.



This is what anise seed (aka aniseed) and fennel look like. See how big the fennel is in comparison? That's why I don't usually use it... but since I decided to add the aniseed early this time-- I put it in the frying pan along with the onion-- I knew the fennel would have time to cook and absorb liquid so it was softer and less weird to eat, so I threw it in.



Caramelized onions, garlic in the middle. I wanted my onions to be brown around the edges and white in the middle so they would have a little bit of crunch left, so I put them on a higher heat than you would normally use. Normally it's going to be about a 6/10, I did this on about 8/10.



Tomatoes in the pan. Cook them until they're mush. While you're waiting, if the sausage is cool enough, slice it up into whatever shape you like that'll fit on a fork.



Peppers in the pan.



Potatoes, sliced sausage, basil, and salt in the pan once the peppers look almost done. Don't forget to taste when you're salting-- salt, stir, taste. Salt, stir, taste. Repeat until desired effect is reached. Be careful when salting, undersalting is super easy to fix but oversalting food is very hard to fix. When in doubt, use less.

LOOK HOW MUCH THERE IS I didn't mean to make quite that much but hey we've got food for like a week now lol

Also, do you see the tomatoes? No? They're gone. They turned into a sauce.



Because I mentioned them, my knives. This isn't all of them, just the ones I use most. The top one is a Henckels chef's knife, nothing fancy but it gets the job done and does it well. German knives tend to go dull faster than Japanese knives-- the steel they use isn't as hard-- so I have to hone it often.

The bottom one is my baby, the one I use on special occasions like company coming over or when precision is necessary for what I'm doing. That's a custom blade for a store here in my hometown, they don't sell them anymore. It's sharp as fuck, a little over nine inches long, and yes it's etched with cherry blossoms.