Sausage and Mushroom Topping

 Sausage and Mushrooms served over Mashed Potatoes with Lemon Steamed Spinach

This recipe is great as a meal on it's own or to top baked potatoes, use as a pizza topper, put in tacos, burritos or taco salad, enchiladas, pasta sauce...the list goes on.  Can you tell I loved it?

I made this last night and it was really easy.  Here's how:

1 1/2 to 2 cups my Roasted Vegetable Stock or any other you may have on hand
3 Tbl liquid aminos
5 cloves garlic (minced)
1 1/2 cups dry Textured Soy Protein (TSP)
1 1/2 cups dry mushrooms
4 cups boiling water
1 tsp dry thyme
2 Tbl Vegan Worcestershire Sauce (See my vegan Pantry)
1 Tbl Not Beef Bouillon
2 Tbl  Fennel seeds
2 Tbl Crushed Red Pepper flakes
Cracked Black Pepper

Grind the fennel seeds and crushed red pepper flakes until they're almost powdery
In separate bowls add 2 cups boiling water to the Textured Soy Protein and 2 cups boiling water to the
Dry Mushrooms.  Let them soak until they become soft then chop the mushrooms up and strain both.
In a non-stick skillet add all of the liquid and then all of the dry ingredients except the TSP and Chopped Mushrooms.  Once the liquids come to a boil, add the TSP and Mushrooms.  Continue cooking until the liquids are almost gone.  The Spinach is just Steamed or quickly boiled fresh baby spinach (about 3 cups) served with fresh lemon.  You're done.

Baked Beans and Sausage

Blogger Bea wanted to share this with everyone.   Thanks Bea Hi, Ken. This is one of our favorite foods. Very flavorful, no oil or fat. It works really well with the vegan sausages. I made the sausages the other day and discovered that it is best to add all the spices before adding the  gluten and nutrition flakes which makes the dough stiffen and difficult to incorporate the spices.  (Ken replies:   I'd have to look over the recipe again, but it's always a good idea to fully mix all of the dry ingredients together in a recipe unless it tells you not to.  This way every bite will contain every ingredient.)  We served the sausage on top of toasted La Brea whole wheat bread that is not soft like a bun. Then put the beans on top of it and added sautéed onions and bell peppers. Had corn on the cob with it.

*CHECK OUT THE NEW ADDITION UNDER EATING OUT LINK ABOVE

Pizza, Pizza

My sister wanted to make pizza for few of her friends, so I said let's try it out ahead of time to see how it goes.

For the base we used a sangak bread which is a Persian national bread.  It is basically whole wheat flour, water and yeast with sesame seeds on top right before baking.  It's kind of fun to watch them make it at our local store.  It's a very wet dough and is pretty much poured on the hot grill.  It's about three feet long, 14 inches wide and works great for pizza.  This is what I used, but you can use any whole wheat, oil free pizza dough you would like.

We made two different kinds.  The top one is a roasted tomato sauce with grilled veggies.  For the second one we call it sausage and onion.

For the roasted tomato sauce, roast the tomatoes as I showed you on my previous post a couple of days ago, along with the onions and garlic.  Put it all in a Cuisinart or blender and whir it up.  Use about a cup and a half of the sauce and to it add 1 tsp. crushed red pepper (more if you like it spicy), and s&p to taste.  Pour the sauce and cover the bread leaving about an inch around the edges with no sauce.  We grilled up some zucchini, yellow squash, red, yellow and orange bell peppers and eggplant.  At the end add sliced black olives.  Put it on a sheet pan lined with silpat (previous post) or parchment paper, or a pizza stone if you have one.  Put it in a 500 ° preheated oven for about 5 minutes.  Just keep an eye on it.  It's done when the edges start to look dark brown or black.

For the second one I took no fat meat crumbles (you can use TVP textured Vegetable Protein if you can't find the ready made crumbles.  Just rehydrate it with equal parts hot water to TVP) and to the crumbles added 1 tablespoon no beef bouillon, 1 tablespoon Vegan Worcestershire, 2 tablespoons fennel seed, half crushed, half whole, 1 tablespoon dry rosemary crushed, 1 tablespoon tomato paste, 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper.  Heat all of it in a non stick pan.  Put about 6 large handfuls of spinach in it and add 1/2 cup water.  Cover so the spinach will cook down.  Once it's all cooked down, stir it up and you're ready to go.

For the pizza we made a cashew cheeze sauce using 1 cup cashews, ground fine, the juice of 2 lemons, 1 cup of basil firmly packed, 1/2 cup of the extra roasted tomato sauce.  Blend this all in your Cuisinart or blender (taste for S&P)  and you're ready to go.

The Cheeze is the base of the pizza  followed by the sausage mixture.  To that add grilled mushrooms, grilled onions sliced and rehydrated sundried tomatoes (rehydrate by putting the dry tomatoes in a cup of water in the microwave for one minute.  Let them soak about 5 minutes then thinly slice them).  Bake the same way as the vegetable pizza, 500° preheated oven about 5 minutes.

As an added feature, though I don't have any pictures of this, I added chopped kale mixed with one avocado and the juice of one lemon and 1/2 tsp of salt together.  Mix everything up with your hands (that's right, squish it all together). This is the topping that will go on the vegetable pizza when it comes out of the oven.

For the sausage pizza, take about 2 cups of arugula (rocket if you're from Europe) and squeeze the juice of one lemon on it with a little salt.  Put this on top of the pizza when it comes out of the oven.