Hybrid Bagel Dogs

The other day I really wanted to make some bread. I hadn't enough flour for a loaf so I got creative. The end result was a half bread, half bagel, hot dog sandwich! Not too bad.

Breakfast sammies!

A good while ago I made some breakfast sandwiches with seitan sausage, tofu "eggs" and onions on homemade bread... Then I completely forgot about them and they got lost in the maze of photos on my camera. Good thing I check before I erased everything from the memory card, because I found these great photos!

Apple Sausage Dogs

These weren't your normal hot dogs!

Homemade pickles turned into homemade relish for these hot dogs with Smoked Apple Sage sausages.

Hot Dog Sandwich

After a somewhat long day with bikes, children, and lots of coffee, you know what? It's dinner time! It's not fancy cooking time, though, so I used a sausage I made recently thrown in with with grilled onion, mustard and relish on toasted Dave's Killer Good Seed bread. A hot dog sandwich.

As I do, here is an extreme close-up:

The onions were al dente but I didn't mind at all. I also think the relish was a great addition, though I see how that might be weird to some people too. Does that sound good to anybody else?

Not-so-spicey Italian Sausages

I haven't made seitan lately, so I decided to jump back into it with a Spicy Italian Seitan Sausage recipe from the internet. I am pretty sure that if you search for those key words you too can find this recipe (or one similar!).

Some necessary and perhaps predictable ingredients include: vital wheat gluten, nutritional yeast, flour, soy sauce and water.

Some fun ingredients include: paprika, chili flakes, fresh minced garlic and ground allspice.

Smoked Apple Sage sausage

Not too long ago I declared that the best veggie sausage in the market is made by Field Roast. I still think this is true, but I no longer feel like I'll spend so much money on them because I can make them at home! In true form, I constructed a recipe from multiple online sources so that I could pick and choose which ingredients I wanted (read: had) and which I didn't.

The dominant flavors were these:

Fresh Braeburn apple
Rubbed sage leaf
Liquid hickory smoke

Ohter things that my delicate palate may or may not have been able to taste: cayenne pepper, sea salt, ground pepper, thyme, Tamari soy sauce, garlic

The end result was firm, flavorful and fun to look at! They tasted great with Patatas Bravas, in a sammie with veggies and all by themselves (browned in a little olive oil).

After getting to know a little about gluten and how it behaves, I am excited to experiment. Once the liquid to vital wheat gluten ratio is set up, the seasonings seem limitless. Any ideas on good sausage flavors out there? Spicey Italian is one I always like. Perhaps something with orange?

Breakfast Disaster

Oh dear...

That lid just flew right off of the large (too large!) salt container. (Edit: The salt washed away in a colander and it was all okay after my initial freak out.)

It started with beets...

This was a wonderful meal that just kind of happened as I walked through the grocery store. Well, really, Bree and I had this great adventure involving a warm drink (Toddy!) in a thermos at some bluffs overlooking the river at sunset. It was nice but then it was cold and we were hungry and had beets on our minds.

It's hard for me to describe the meal because there ended up being many parts instead of one bowl of every ingredient, like a stir-fry. I suppose that's what lists are for:
-Beet and a pear mixed green salad with White Wine Vinaigrette
-Smoked Apple Sage sausage
-Sauteed beet greens and fried Polenta rounds

Beets are wonderful and sweet and their leaves are actually very nutritious and largely overlooked in the leafy-greens department. I lightly sauteed the leaves in a little Earth Balance until they wilted and served them with the polenta and sausage. The polenta was fried in a combination of olive oil, balsamic vinegar and course salt and pepper until the surface was crispy and golden.

The sausage is made by a company called Field Roast from Seattle, WA. This is the most delicious veggie sausage I have ever had in my life! They are pricey at around $6.99 for four links, but they are very much worth the splurge (especially when on sale for $4.99). I lightly browned the sausage in a pan after slicing it into little rounds.

As for the salad, I boiled the beets and cut them into small cubes and added them the the thinly cut pear and onion. Usually I don't boil veggies because all the good stuff boils out into the water but I've saved the beet water and look forward to reusing it today. It would be nice to use the beet water in a fresh juice of some sort but I don't have that technology so I might use it to make a pink pasta salad of some sort. A quick internet search yields many interesting results for beet water usage, though.