Welcome to Recommendations From a Picky Eater, which may (or may not) be a recurring subject where I offer my suggestions based on a lifetime of being a picky eater.
During the height of the pandemic, we switched first to grocery pickup, and then to grocery delivery. At the time, I thought it would be temporary, in that I believed I enjoyed grocery shopping.
Turns out I can completely live without the experience. It takes a little planning so that we don’t run out of things, but overall, we are eating better, saving money (fewer impulse buys) and definitely saving time.
There are only two items that I strangely cannot seem to get – my preferred brand of cottage cheese is only available in the Kansas City area at the one store that doesn’t deliver or do pickup, and my very favorite brand of meatless sausage seems to have disappeared off the earth.
I’m a vegetarian; Mr. SuzerSpace is not. We had found Tofurky Italian Meatless Sausage to be an acceptable compromise for both of us. Sometimes it is still listed in the app for the grocery delivery, but it always gets substituted, and I’m not a big fan of the alternate brand, in that I don’t think it tastes as good, is more difficult to cook and is way more expensive.
I decided to try and make my own meatless sausage, and as always, the Internet did not disappoint when searching for recipes.
This isn’t a food blog, so instead of trying to make someone else’s meatless sausage recipe my own and ruining my day trying to take artsy photographs of sausage making, I’ll share with you two good links to follow if this is something you’d like to take on. Most recipes are pretty similar, but I vaguely followed this one from Elephantastic Vegan and this one from YumSome.
I prefer recipes that don’t have a ton of odd ingredients that I will never use again, and I also don’t like to buy one-off purpose kitchen gadgets, so just a heads up that I did need to buy two specific items – Vital Wheat Gluten, which is a powdery flour, and it’s often in the health food section of the grocery (or I get mine from Amazon), and a steamer insert for a pot.
I never follow recipes to the letter. Especially when it calls for something like 1 Tablespoon of Tomato Paste. That just means I’m about to carefully package up a nearly full can of tomato paste with good intentions of using it, only to discover it six week later with a carpet of green across the top. Instead, I used ketchup. I also didn’t use Maple Syrup because we don’t have any.
The results were really good. The first batch was tasty but super ugly. The second batch was a winner and I’m now in a solid rotation of making these on Sunday afternoons to enjoy on Monday night in what we call “Shausage Salad Night”. It would be impossible to find, but years ago Jay Leno did a bit on his funny headlines segment that showed a grocery ad with Sausage misspelled and we’ve stuck with that pronunciation ever since.
