This is what I call a fridge-eater recipe. I made it one night with no time and no plan. I opened the fridge and grabbed everything that seemed at least vaguely to go together. I took some sausage from the freezer, some peppers on their last legs, some broccoli rabe, and a couple odds and ends of onions. Add to that the remnants of a few open cans of tomatoes and . . . voilà, classic sausage and peppers. The key here is getting a nice sear on the sausage and cooking the tomato down until it coats the sausage and vegetables well.
The longer this sits in the fridge, the more delicious it gets. Reheat it and then throw it on a hoagie or on a mound of mashed potatoes or with polenta.
The greatest failure when making potato salad is overcooking the spuds—creamy mashed pota-toes is a no-go for any potato salad recipe. You want a waxy variety like fingerlings, Yukon Golds, or red potatoes; these varieties will keep their shape and texture when cooked right. Bobby Seale, cofounder of the Black Panther Party, said it well in his 1988 cookbook Barbeque’n with Bobby, where he wrote under a recipe titled “Hunky Crunchy Potato Salad” that his mother’s potato salad was a “tasty quasi-mashed potato salad.” My pro tip is to season the potatoes while they are warm. Begin your training to be a queen.
Moules frites are easily one of my favorite things to order at a seafood restaurant. If you eat a dish like this outdoors in the summertime, ideally with your feet in the sand or resting gently on the grass, you will remember it forever. Don’t be afraid to work with mussels—they take a little while to clean, but they cook in minutes and are very inexpensive.