Harissa Tomato Sauce

This is a variation on your traditional tomato pasta dish.

Its super easy to prepare and quite tasty!

Two really nice ingredients to have in this dish are Merguez sausages and Harissa. Merguez sausages are a North African/ Moroccan lamb sausages. The lamb meat is mixed with Harissa, red peppers, anise and other spices. You can make your own or purchase them from specialty food stores. Here in the Bay area, I have found them at Marin Sun Farms in Oakland and Cafe Rouge in Berkeley.



Ingredients
4 Merguez sausages, cut
1/4 white onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced

2 Tomatoes, diced 

Harissa, 2 teaspoons or to taste
1/2 or 1 bunch Kale cut into slivers
Salt 

1/2 cup Mushrooms, sliced

Chicken stock (2 or 3 cubes, about 1/4 of a cup)

1 jar of tomato pasta sauce (I usually use Classico-its pretty good, and the jars look cool and are good for reusing as containers for grains)
Red Wine
Balsamic Vinegar
Salt


Directions
Add some oil to a large pan. Add the cut up Merguez sausages. Cook for a few minutes, until they are no longer raw. The harissa and other flavoring should begin to seep out of the sausages and turn your oil reddish.


Add the onion and stir fry for a few minutes, until the onions have lost their raw taste and are translucent. Add the garlic and continue to stir fry for a few minutes until the garlic turn a light golden color.










Add the tomatoes and continue to stir fry. Once the tomatoes are cooked, add the Harissa and continue to stir fry for a few minutes to let the flavors absorb.

Add the kale and salt and continue to stir fry until the kale begins to break down and gets softer.











Add the mushroom and continue to stir fry until the mushrooms begin to cook down and absorb some of the flavor.

Add the chicken stock (frozen cubes are fine) and stir around until the cubes begin to melt.

Add your tomato sauce and mix all of the ingredients together. Reduce the heat to low.

If you have some day old red wine, pour a little bit into the pasta jar and mix it around so that all the remaining pasta sauce in the jar mixes with the wine. Pour that into the mixture.

Taste. Add some Basalmic vinegar and/or salt to taste.

This can be used to spice up any tomato based dish:  Lasagna, Eggplant Parmesan or fresh over pasta.

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