Vegetarian Sausage | 3 bean, lentil & mushroom sausage

Posted on by gloriouslygoodfood

This vegetarian sausage is really quick and easy to make

I’ve recently started  making a lot of different sausages and when my vegetarian friends asked me to come up with some vegetarian sausage recipes, I decided to take up the challenge!

My first one was the sweet potato, caramelised onion and sundried tomato sausage with a chilli kick, but I also really fancied doing something with beans and lentils as they are so tasty, nutritious and versatile.

Note: These vegetarian sausages can also be made into vegetarian burgers / patties without the vegetarian sausage casings.  Simply shape into a burger / patty and fry with a little oil in a non-stick pan.

Vegetarian Sausage | 3 bean lentil mushroom sausage
Vegetarian sausage in vegetarian / vegan sausage casings, ready to ‘cook’

 

Ingredients for 8 vegetarian sausages (these quantities will make 7-8 vegetarian sausages, plus whatever is left in the sausage-making funnel/mechanism)

  • 250g closed cup chestnut mushrooms, cleaned, finely sliced and then coarsely chopped
  • 3 large cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 50g lightly salted butter
  • 115g tinned butter beans in water, drained (typically from a 250g – undrained weight – tin)
  • 115g tinned cannellini beans in water, drained
  • 115g tinned kidney beans in water, drained
  • 115g ready-to-eat Puy Lentils (I use Merchant Gourmet ones)
  • fine sea salt (to taste)
  • Vegetarian / Vegan Sausage casings (I found these online – available from various retailers)

Method

vegetarian sausages
finely sliced then roughly chopped closed cup chestnut mushrooms in the pan with butter and garlic

Melt the butter in a non-stick pan

Gently fry the garlic on a low heat (do not let it brown, merely soften a little and infuse the butter with garlic flavour)

Add the mushrooms, season lightly with a little sea salt, turn up the heat and cook on a high heat until they are cooked and some of the juices have reduced down – but do retain a little bit of liquid

Meanwhile, ‘blitz’ the butter beans, cannelini beans and kidney beans in a food processor but only very briefly, so as to retain some chunky texture

Add the Puy lentils to the bean mixture and mix by hand

Add the fried mushrooms

If the mixture is a little dry, add a bit of melted butter

Season with sea salt (to taste)

vegetarian sausage mixture
vegetarian sausage mixture ready to go into vegetarian / vegan sausage casings

Push the mixture into the vegetarian sausage casings using a sausage-making machine/funnel (note that when you twist the ends, unlike with natural casings, they won’t remain properly twisted…leave enough room at the end to allow for a bit of expansion of the contents during cooking and prevent all the filling from escaping from the ends)

Grill or fry (careful if you BBQ – the vegetarian sausage casings have a tendency to tear open / explode on the high heat!) and serve with accompaniments of your choice

Vegetarian Sausage – Gloriously Simple, Gloriously Good!

Advertisement

Tomato Spaghetti | Spaghetti al Pomodoro Fresco

Posted on by gloriouslygoodfood

Spaghetti with fresh tomatoes, basil and garlic

One of my favourite summer recipes – incredibly quick and easy to make

I love this recipe!  To me, it just shouts out “It’s Summer!” The colours, the scent, the flavours…everything comes together to give your taste buds a glorious treat.

Tomato Spaghetti

Ingredients for Spaghetti with fresh Tomatoes, Garlic and Basil (quantities according to taste)

  • Spaghetti
  • Fresh tomatoes, chopped up
  • Fresh garlic, finely chopped or crushed (about half a clove per person, but this is subject to individual taste)
  • Fresh basil leaves, torn or roughly chopped
  • A generous splash of extra virgin olive oil
  • Salt to taste
  • Ground chilli flakes to taste (add to individual servings at the dinner table)

Method

Bring a big pan of water to the boil, add a handful of coarse sea salt and a drop of oil (no need for olive oil here, it’s just to stop the pasta from sticking)

Put enough spaghetti into the boiling water for however many people you’re feeding and cook to ‘al dente’ consistency (cooked but not soggy, with a little bit of ‘bite’ left)

While the pasta is cooking, chop the tomatoes and finely chop or crush the garlic

Place these into a big bowl and add the chopped or torn basil leaves

Season with salt (to taste) and add a generous helping of excellent quality extra virgin olive oil

When the pasta is cooked, drain and immediately transfer into the bowl holding the tomatoes, basil & garlic

Toss everything together and serve immediately!

For those that enjoy a bit of spice, provide ground chilli flakes (we have ours in a salt/pepper mill set to its finest setting) and each individual can add these to their own portion, to taste.

Enjoy!

Tomato Spaghetti – Gloriously Simple, Gloriously Good!

Sardinian Sausage | Salsiccia Fresca | S’Artizzu

Posted on by gloriouslygoodfood

Sardinian Sausage

Also known as “Salsiccia Fresca” or S’Artizzu (its sardinian name)

Sardinian Sausage Cooked | Salsiccia Fresca | S'Artizzu

These Sardinian delights are one of the many things I relish tucking into whenever we visit family in Sardinia.  As they’re impossible to get over here, I almost get withdrawal symptoms, so I decided to take the plunge and make some myself.

I looked for recipes online and, as they’re such an artisanal product, it was difficult to find an actual recipe, but at least it gave me the basic idea of what ingredients I needed to include.  I’ve then played with the quantities until I (and hubby) was satisfied that the flavour was as close as we could get it to the ones we have eaten in Sardinia.

The unique flavour of these sausages comes from aniseed (though fennel seeds are used interchangeably, depending on who is making the sausages).  I found it quite tricky to find aniseed (which surprised me!), so I made these with fennel seeds.

In Sardinia, you would buy S’Artizzu (sardinian sausage) in huge rings to cook over a barbecue, then chop it up once cooked into smaller pieces to to serve on a big platter for everyone to help themselves.  The quantities indicated below would make approximately 2 such giant rings, or 12-16 smaller individual portion rings (depending on the size of the rings).sardinian sausage ring

Hubby and I used natural sausage casings we bought from a lovely butcher at Doncaster market, though it was really hard work to thread these onto the nozzle on the sausage-making kit on our mixer.  Next time, we’ll try using natural casings bought on a spool.  I’ve found a site that sells them HERE.

Ingredients

  • Sausage Casings: Natural Sheep (thin, for chippolata sausages)
  • 1.7kg fatty pork meat (we used a mixture of pork belly and pork shoulder)
  • 3tsp fennel seeds (or aniseed if you can find it), crushed with a pestle & mortar
  • 2tsp fine sea salt
  • a good dash of freshly ground black pepper
  • 5 cloves of garlic (very finely chopped or put them through the mincer with the meat)
  • a good dash of dry white whine (approx. 80ml)

Sardinian Sausage Cooked | Salsiccia Fresca | S'Artizzu

Method

Ask your butcher to take the rind off the pork but leave as much of the fat on as possible, then chop the meat into chunks you can feed through your mincer (grinder).

Mix the meat chunks, fennel seeds, salt, pepper and peeled garlic cloves in a big bowl (you can leave these to marinate/infuse the flavours for a couple of hours if you like)

Put the seasoned meat & garlic cloves through your mincer on the biggest/chunkiest setting (Italian sausages tend to have a coarser texture than many British ones)

Add the wine to the minced meat mixture and mix well by hand (don’t over-work the mixture, but make sure the flavours are evenly spread and the wine has been absorbed into the mixture)

Now the fun begins!! Feed the mixture into your sausage-maker loaded with a long length of thin natural casing and gently fill the casing.  Ideally, you want to make one long continuous length you can roll into a big ring (about the size of a dinner plate).

Before cooking, put 2 wooden/bamboo kebab sticks through the ring to form a cross, so that the ring will hold its shape on the barbecue.  Or, you can make smaller rings like we did, or even thin straight chippolatas (which, due to the casings breaking on us a LOT when we made these, we also ended up doing).  Grill, pan-fry, griddle or barbecue your sausages.  Freeze those you don’t need to use straight away.

Enjoy!!!

Gloriously Good (and aside from the stuffing of the casings…Gloriously Simple!) 😉