Clams (and Andouille) in Red Sauce over Pasta

Heading down to the lake we stopped at Costco and they had fresh clams so grabbed them --then had to figure how I was going to serve them and as it was a chilly night I decided to make them up in a red sauce.
With a bit of improvising using a basic recipe we made this and it was very good. Katie got to get some of the leftovers and raved about it. (There was also a lot of clams so I saved about 1/3 of them -steamed them and saved the cleaned cooked clams to make clam chowder with -see other blog)

Ingredients
3# clams
1 bell pepper, chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic,chopped or crushed
2 andouille sausage chopped ( these were chicken ones from Costco)
EVOO
14 oz can diced tomatoes
28 oz can crushed tomatoes
1-2 T tomato paste
1 T crushed red pepper
1/2+ c dry red wine
1 # spaghetti  pasta -(we used dreamfields)
**ignore the Folgers coffee in the background - its the lake and stores on counter top!**

In a large family sized skillet -heat EVOO and saute onions, red peppers, andouille sausage, garlic and red pepper flakes for about 3-5 minutes until onions are soft.

Add your 1/2 c or so of red wine and allow that to cook out about 1-2 mins
Meanwhile bring your pasta water to boil and begin to cook pasta.

Next add in your diced tomatoes

Then your crushed tomatoes and tomato paste --heat this up to just starting to bubble

Nestle in your clams--I just filled the skillet until I had no more room for clams (then saved the rest to steam separate for clam chowder)

Cover and simmer about 5 min or so until clams open up.

Look like this --now remember the rule of clams--if they are already open before cooking -THROW THEM OUT --if they DO NOT OPEN after cooking--THROW THEM OUT--now that being said --I did have to kind of stir them around in the sauce after the 5 minutes and bring some of the outlying clams to the center of the sauce and stir and then every clam in the sauce did open.

Serve of your pasta --yummy--warm crusty bread would be fab with this to get every drop of the sauce!