Silly Sausage!

Sometimes, meals start with a side dish. I have been flicking through Vegan Planet a lot lately - I do love that book - and seeing as it is now summer I am looking at some salady type stuff to be making. I love a pasta salad, so I decided I should make Lighten Up Pasta Salad on Thursday evening. But what to go with? Pasta salad does not equal dinner. Well, sometimes it does, but not this night. The book suggested it is a great side for vegan sausages, and I remembered reading a homemade vegan sausage recipe not too long ago. I was sold!

The recipe in question comes was Homemade Sausages from Vegan Dad, which in turn seem to come from Isa's blog at The PPK. I made a double batch, because that was how much my tin of beans would make and also because I have a work BBQ on Sunday and wanted some extra sausages to take along to that.

The recipe is easy enough to follow and make. While other spice combinations are suggested, I followed the recipe to the letter for this first attempt. For those of you used to making seitan-type proucts before, this mixture is a lot more moist compared to if you are making seitan chunks or cutlets. I have to say, when you are forming the logs on the alfoil sheets, it is not the most appetising thing to look at! But don't let that put you off!

This recipe called for the sausages to be steamed. VeganDad and some other blogs I've seen have bought handy steamer trays that fit right into their saucepans. I didn't have the exact perfect steamer to use here, but I cobbled one together. I only have one of those vegetable steamers that expands to the size of your saucepan. For this recipe you work you need a large flat steamer to fit the sausages. What I did was I used this steamer in my 10L stockpot. The stockpot was big enough so that the steamer basket was completely extended and flat. That alone didn't really leave enough room to add much water underneath for the steaming, so I propped it up using a small round metal cake rack. That gave me room to add a good inch or so of water underneath. I then steamed it on medium heat with the lid on.



Here is a picture of the sausages placed in my makeshift sausage steamer. What dazzling silverness! It actually worked great, and could be used for any steamed sietan recipe. The only thing is that my steamer has a permanently attached spike in the middle with a ring to allow you to remove it from your saucepan, so that would make this unable to be used for large seitan roasts. However you can get these vegetable steamers with detachable hooks. I used to have one in Sydney, but I don't know where it is after the move, so I will go and buy another one. Much cheaper than buying the actual steamer component to the stockpot. Hurrah!



Here are the sausages, all steamed and awaiting their next fate. I had to steam them in two batches because I had doubled the recipe and only 6 at a time would fit in the steamer. One thing I wasn't sure is if I was meant to unwrap them from the foil to let them cool, or if I was supposed to let them cool in the foil. So for each batch I did a different thing. No really huge difference, but I think that the ones that cooled still wrapped in foil held up a bit better.



And here's dinner! I fried the sausages in a fry pan with just a smidge of olive oil. I also fried up some sliced onions to go with them. So homemade sausages and onions in a roll with ketchup and mustard. Also pictured here are the Lighten Up Pasta Salad and the Sweet Baby Salad from Coles. I know, prepackaged salads = evil. Bit I really like this one because it has lots of fun and interesting green stuff in it. Also I baked some frozen French Fries. Which weren't strictly needed but I saw them in the photo with the sausages from Vegan Dad and thus my craving was born!

The verdict? The sausages are amazingly wonderful! So tasty, amazing texture, completely cruelty free and you get to feel incredibly smug for having made your own sausages from scratch. Tee hee. They were maybe a little heavy on the fennel, so I might tone that down a bit next time. The Lighten Up Pasta Salad from Vegan Planet was quite a nice side dish, but did just seem to be lacking a little something in flavour. I like the Deli Macaroni Salad from Veganomicon better. But all around a great dinner!

And tomorrow I am taking both left over sausages and salad to my work Christmas BBQ, to show them all how much it rocks to be vegan!

Oh yeah, do yourself a favour and go and make the sausages if you haven't already!

Can't go past the pasta.

I haven't really been blogging too much about what I have been cooking of late. Bad Susan. But here I shall make it up with a feast of CARBS. I love pasta in all its forms. I love that it is generally super quick to make, that it generally includes lots of fresh vegetables and interesting tastes, plus all the fun you can have with different types of pastas. The pasta section of my pantry is practically bursting with fettucine (I love the spinach variety), spaghetti (wholemeal - yum), fusilli, macaroni (straight and elbow), penne, ziti, linguine, vemicelli... it goes on and there are still more out there to try. Just the other night I stumbled across this fantastic pasta glossary. The different types of pasta available are just insane!

Anyway, here are some of my favourite pasta dishes that I've been making over the past few weeks, and a couple of old favourites as well. I will mention that, as a general rule, I always use less pasta than the recipe states. 1 pound (or 450g, which lets face it is pretty much just going to be a 500g packet) is what most cookbooks use for a 4 person recipe, and this just makes way too much for me, even with my big appetite and love of carbs. I also prefer it this way because it means it is saucier, which is always a good thing! I probably use a half to three quarters of the pasta required by the recipe.



This is meant to be Orecchiette With Cherry Tomatoes And Kalamata Olives, however at the time I was unable to find orecchiette (curse you Roselands shopping center and your lack of exciting pasta shapes!), so I made it with, umm, macaroni. Oh well. The fact is that this is blow your mind tasty. It's practically a tapenade all mixed up with your pasta, and then the cherry tomatoes add this burst of freshness. So yum! Oh yeah, and it is from Vegan With A Veangeance.



It's kind of blurry, but it is Spinach Linguine With Basil Mint Pesto from Veganomicon. I haven't made that much homemade pesto yet, and this was one of my first. And OMG - do eeeet! It was amazing. I think this dish would also be great with some strips of chicken style seitan or Fry's Schnitzels or something along those lines.

The next three recipes are all ones I have made in the last few weeks, and they all come from Vegan Planet. I am on quite the VP kick at the moment. Though there are 400 recipes in it, so it has lots to offer.



This is Alfredo-Style Fettucine. The Alfredo sauce is based on onion, white wine (or a teeny splash of white wine vinegar in my case, or just leave it out all together), almonds, silken tofu, miso, soymilk, nutmeg and cayenne. It is a really nice, creamy sauce that is not too heavy and sits really nicely with the spinach fettucine I used. It was excellent with liberal sprinklings of nooch, and with a nice salty green, like sauteed broccolini as pictured here. The sauce takes a bit of preparation, but the whole thing still comes together pretty quickly.



I am always a bit skeptical of anything with tahini, because the truth is I am not really a tahini fan. Sure, I love it all whizzed up into hommus and things like that, but otherwise I am always a bit worried that the taste will be overpowering. Not in Tahini Rotini (or fusilli) with Broccoli and Lemon. The sauce is basically a hommus-style sauce - in addition to the tahini there is chickpeas, garlic and lemon, but it is thinned with vegetable stock. It is wonderful. I also increased the broccoli content of this recipe from the required 2 cups to however much my two large heads of broccoli yield.

On another note - other excellent tahini recipes include the tomato tahini pasta sauce from Easy Vegan Cooking and Isa's tahini sauce recipe from one or possibly both of her cookbooks.



This final dish of the Vegan Planet Pasta Trilogy is Ziti, Artichokes and Kalamatas with Spicy Tomato Sauce. This is a really, really tasty little pasta dish. And it is insanely easy and quick to make. The recipe calls for 9oz frozen artichoke hearts that have been cooked according to packet directions. As far as I can tell, these just aren't available in the places I regularly shop in Brisbane. So I used a 400g tin of artichoke (the ones from the tinned vegetable aisle, not the fancy marinated ones from the olive aisle) which I rinsed and drained. I also chopped up the artichokes roughly. The recipe calls for chopped kalamatas, but who doesn't love big juicy olives all through their pasta? So I left the kalamatas whole. I served it with a side of roasted green beans, but I think steamed broccoli or a good green salad would rock it too.

And there ends this current musing of pasta. And I haven't even touched baked pasta dishes or noodles yet - no doubt topics of the future.