I asked for your cooking questions, and most often you wanted a simple dinner recipe that can be completed with little time and effort. That’s and easy task for me because I cook this way every night of the week.

I control what happens on top of my stove, it doesn’t control me. Many of you that posed questions expressed a frustration with dinners that don’t come out as you expected. This most often comes from following recipes that have no consideration for your particular kitchen, stove, pans, and ingredients. Simply, it’s different in your kitchen than the test kitchen.

The best way to recover the time spent following recipes and create a simple dinner recipe of your own is to use a basic stove-top sauté method. The direct heat transferred to your sauté pan is the quickest way to make a complete meal in one pan.

If you’re a fan of Cajun food from the southern U.S. like me, you’ll love how quick and easy my Sausage Etouffee’ Saute’ is to make. It uses only one pan, but two cooking methods to inspire you to create your own dishes from this procedure.

Here’s what you’ll need:
(of course, you can always make substitutions)

Bacon Fat, olive oil, or butter
Onions, sliced
Thyme
Cayenne Pepper
Coriander
White pepper
Beef Broth
Red Pepper Hummus
Sausage, sliced
Black Eyed Peas
Broccoli
Chopped Tomatoes
Worchestershire sauce

This simple dinner recipe begins with heating a sauté pan until drops of water evaporate on the surface. Then, I add bacon fat because of the great flavor it provides. You can use any type of fat, including oils or butter in your creation.

Now, it’s time to start combining flavors on top of each other. First, sliced onions are sautéed in the bacon fat. You don’t have to use onions. You can use sliced peppers or celery, really anything that you want.

If you’re used to adding seasonings at the end of your cooking, this may surprise you. Because I want the flavor of my seasonings to permeate the entire dish, I’ve chosen to add them very early in the process, incorporating thyme, cayenne pepper, coriander and white pepper right into the onion sauté. This way, the flavors will become part of the pan sauce, and not just laying on top of the meal.

By this time, I’ve got a lot of heat and some caramelized bits on the bottom of the pan, so a cold liquid is needed to drop the temperature of the pan, and begin to cook the onions in a moist fashion. I use beef broth for this step, but you can use wine or even liquors.

Letting the beef broth evaporate to condense flavors is called reduction, and we’ll reduce the liquid by at least one-half before proceeding with the next ingredients because we want our pan sauce to stick to food, not be a puddle in the bottom of our plate.

There are three ways to thicken a sauce, all of which are covered in my DVD series, “Burn Your Recipes”, but this simple dinner recipe uses a trick I’ve never taught before.

The chef-secret I’m exposing today is an ingenious way to thicken this pan liquid, and add more flavor to the dish. Sauces are thickened with a thickening agent, by reduction, or by adding an ingredient that is thicker than the sauce itself. In my Sausage Etouffee’ Saute’ , I’ve chosen to use Red Pepper Hummus as a thickening agent. It will also add the flavor of red pepper to this meal.

Once my pan sauce is created, I can start adding all the rest of the ingredients to cook under the moist, convective heat that’s created by placing the lid on top of the pan. So, after black eyed peas, broccoli, diced tomatoes, and some worchestershire sauce, the dish is finished with the lid on.

I totally made this up. I’m not talking about the cooking procedures, they’re standard and basic. I created a simple dinner recipe, my own version of a Cajun etouffee’. You can make up your own dinners as well with the skills involved with stove top sauté.

Create endless Simple Dinner Recipes with my cooking dvd.