VEGETARIAN BREAKFAST SAUSAGE!!!!!!

OH MY GOD THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU WILL READ ALL DAY!!!!

...unless you eat pork, if so, just disregard this and get oinky.

Have you ever had these....

crack.

They are deeelicious, aren't they??  But full of soy, and probably other nasty junk, but oh how I loved them when I ate soy.  I ate them trashy style with processed American "cheese" slices and lots of ketchup.  Sometimes on a bagel or English muffin.  Sometimes my mom made sausage gravy with them, which was pretty awesome (by the way, I have two really good recipes for vegetarian gravy - one with apple cider, one with red onion... I should work on those before the holidays!!)

Anyway, I've been making lima bean breakfast sausage for a year or two now, and while it's not bad, it is NOT the same at all.  The MorningStar sausage was like kinda sweet, meat-like texture, appealing in appearance, just so much better.  So I've been working on perfecting the slow carb, soy free veggie burger for a really long time (post to come at some point) and my first somewhat successful/break through trial was using this recipe for lentil patties.  I subbed the flour for lentil flour and I got a burger that held together really well.  The spice combination was not great, but I noticed that the appearance totally reminded me of my beloved old forbidden sausage.  I actually wrote in my notebook "Kinda remind me of MSF sausage - try sometime?"  That was back on 7/17/13, and while I have made several batches of veggie burgers since then, I never tried the sausage... until yesterday!  I have a good mix for like Italian style sausage, but not for breakfast sausage.  I knew I wanted it to be a little sweet and a little spicy, so I went looking and found Alton Brown's recipe for breakfast sausage.  The man knows his science, and I respect that greatly.  The recipe also looked sweet and spicy and had no ingredients I didn't have on hand like marjoram or ground cloves - perfect.  I didn't have fresh herbs, so I just halved the amount and used dry.  I used almond flour because I was out of lentil flour and didn't feel like grinding more, but I think lentil would make it a bit denser, so I will try that next time.  I added flax to try to make it a little more rubbery, kinda like MSF.  I'm not sure if that is a desirable characteristic or not, but it's what I wanted.  I mixed that up and fried up one test sausage and decided it needed a little more brown sugar and a little this and that, and it was a little too crumbly so I added another egg, and the next test was perfect!  It could have been a little hotter, but I didn't know if it would get too hot over time, so I left it as is, but maybe will up the heat next go round.  So here are my instructions for the final product.  This makes a ton of sausage that you can use to feed many hungry breakfast buddies, freeze for later use, or just figure out how to scale it down for your own needs.  I got 20 patties from this recipe.


Jenny's Life Altering Breakfast Sausage

1 bag of dried lentils (16oz/2 cups)
3 eggs
1/2 cup almond flour
1/4 cup ground flax
1 T canola oil
1 t coconut aminos
1/2 t Worcestershire sauce
1 1/2 T dark brown sugar
1 t salt
2 t ground black pepper
1 t dried sage
1 t dried thyme
1/4 t dried rosemary
1/4 t ground nutmeg
1/2 t cayenne
1/2 t crushed red pepper flakes
dash of onion powder
dash of garlic salt
2 dashes hickory liquid smoke

Put all ingredients in a big bowl.  Mix/blend/mash/squish with your hands.  Maybe wash them first? Then either form patties with your hands or be classy and use a cookie cutter and an empty beer bottle like I did. Now choose your own adventure: you could bake them (maybe 350-400F?), freeze them to deal with later, microwave (ehhhhh), or fry in canola oil like I did.  Follow me!

This was a tasty beer.  I love fall brews!!

Not too pretty raw.  Actually, the whole lentils look a little unsettling and corn-like.

But wait, flip it over and it looks a lot more sausage-like!

Ta-da!  I'm not very good at this frying business.  All the oil got sucked up.  Ooops?  Oh well.  Look, I used my cast iron skillet for old timey sausage authenticity.  No one cared about fat consumption in the Wild Wild West or 1950s.  It's fine.

Lumberjack breakfast.  I decided to make omelet style egg sub instead of cupcakes.  I made 4 for breakfast for the week, this is the only one that turned out perfectly.  I WAS SO PROUD!

This is what the others looked like ..... ughhh use more oil!!!

Food styling.  Who eats a freaking stack of something?  Food bloggers always seem to stack cookies for photos.  Well what now bitches, I stacked the sausage!

I actually ate none of this today.  It all went in the fridge for breakfasts.  I will admit, I wonder how long is safe for me to be photographing food.  How many logs of bacteria were born while I was playing with the flash?  It's probably ok and I will microwave them, that kills stuff, right??  Someone find me a biologist or an infectious disease professional!  Oh wait....

The right way to eat a stack of sausage...

When I was "styling" I was like this omelet and sausage is so lame looking.  So I added more sausage.  Then I was like maybe slice an apple and fan that out, and I'm like yeah I don't feel like eating an apple right now.  Then I was like I wish I had some OJ to put next to it, but I don't drink that crap.  Then when it was all put away I remembered: COFFEE!!!!

 That's Dunkin Spiced Pumpkin in there - mmmm!!!!  Dunkin Donuts: best thing about living in New England - literally one on every corner.  I love it!

So you want some stats on these little boogers??  If you make it according to my directions and only include the oil in the mix, not the frying oil, and count seasoning as negligible, here is what you get per patty:

72 calories

3.4 grams fat

9.5 grams carbs

5.1 grams protein

Not too shabby!  A whole 8 calories less than the MSF!  And I think the calories and fat would be reduced significantly if you used lentil flour instead of almond.  And that one tablespoon of oil is probably not completely necessary.  So there you are, I hope you like them as much as I do.  It tastes pretty much just like MSF, looks a whole lot like them, the texture is a little different as is, BUT there's no soy, and it's probably way cheaper and better for you.  Let me know what you think!

xoxox

JDB