Super Sausage for Bowl Kickoff

OK, it’s Super Bowl Sunday. Your pack is back, and they’re all as lean and mean as Joe Greene and hungry to boot as they root and toot and wait for the longest football game of the year to reach some kind of climax.

You have to feed them, probably something macho. One option is to send out for food from one of the six BJ’s Chicago Pizzerias in the area. Or--thanks to BJ’s co-founder Michael Phillips--you can whip up one of the chain’s most popular sandwiches right in your own kitchen.

It’s the Sam’s Special, a tasty and filling concoction of Italian sausage, onions and peppers simmered in marinara sauce, topped with provolone and baked in a roll. (It isn’t necessary to tell the guys the sandwich is not named for Sam Malone; the Sam in this case is Phillips’ mother, Selma, who was known as Sam to family and friends.)

The beauty of the dish, Phillips says, is that the bulk of the preparation can be done well ahead of time and can be put together in just a few minutes.

It won’t be exactly the sandwich you’d get at BJ’s, because you can’t get the same ingredients, but it will be close. BJ’s sausage, for example, is made for the chain, and the tomato sauce that goes into the marinara is from tomatoes personally inspected by Phillips or one of his crew in the San Joaquin Valley before they’re picked and canned.

That kind of persnicketiness, Phillips says, is what has led to the success of BJ’s, which has restaurants in Laguna Beach, San Juan Capistrano, Balboa Island, La Jolla, Santa Ana and Belmont Shore.

Phillips is what he calls the “food guy” in his partnership with William Cunningham. “He’s the taster,” Phillips says, “and I’m the cook.”

“I’ve always loved the kitchen,” he says, “starting when I was a kid. I’d hang around the kitchen with my mother and my grandmother, and I worked my way through college as a cook in one kind of place or another.”

But it was after Phillips and Cunningham had established themselves in other fields--Phillips was a marketing executive of a national appliance company and Cunningham a vice president of a stock brokerage--that they decided in 1976 to go into the restaurant business.

That’s when, Phillips says, the time spent with Selma in the kitchen really starting paying off.

SAM’S SPECIAL

SAUSAGE SANDWICH

2 pounds Italian sausage links

2 cloves garlic, finely chopped

2 tablespoons butter or margarine

1/2 cup green pepper, coarsely chopped

1/2 cup yellow onion, coarsely chopped

16 ounces marinara sauce with basil

6 hoagie-style rolls (8 inches long)

6 slices provolone

Melt butter in heavy skillet, add sausage and brown over medium heat. Add garlic, green peppers and onion and continue to saute until onions are translucent. Add marinara sauce (available in most supermarkets), mix thoroughly and simmer over low heat an additional 30 minutes. While sausage-sauce mixture is simmering, preheat oven to 400 degrees. Make a six-inch pocket in the side of each roll. Spoon about three tablespoons of the sausage mixture into each roll, top with slice of cheese, place on cookie sheet in center of oven and bake about two minutes (until cheese is melted). Serve with garnish of pepperoncinis. (Serves 6).