Recipe of the Month: Savory Cabbage with Vegan Sausage

According to legend, whatever you do at the start of the new year is what you can expect to be doing all year long. If that's true, we can expect to spend 2021:

• Watching mindless entertainment, like the Dungeons & Dragons game featuring the cast of Stranger Things that we watched on New Year's Eve;
• Repairing broken things, like our D&D Players Handbook and Monster Manual, which Brian successfully restored the broken pages of with bookbinding glue, and my two pairs of old pants that got patched or re-patched; and
  
• Inventing new plant-based recipes, like the cabbage with vegan sausage Brian made last night.
  

Actually, this wasn't so much a new recipe as a meatless adaptation of an old one. Until recently, Brian and I used to be in the habit of buying (free-range, non-factory-farmed) kielbasa sausage from the Amish market. It was handy for a last-minute supper, since we could just fry up a couple of links and cook some potatoes and frozen peas in the microwave, and also for cutting up to add flavor to other recipes. Brian invented one with cabbage, onion, apple, and chunks of sausage all cooked together, which was quite tasty and provided a good dose of healthy fruits and veggies.

However, when we decided to go (mostly) dairy-free, we also started drifting away from the few free-range meat items that were still a part of our diet. This wasn't really a matter of principle; I was okay with them from an ethical standpoint, and chicken and pork don't have as big a carbon footprint as beef, especially when eaten on such an infrequent basis. I think Brian just saw it as an interesting challenge to see how close to vegan we could comfortably get. (As I discovered during last year's Thrift Week, I don't think going full vegan is ever going to be on the cards for us, but the perfect doesn't have to be the enemy of the good-for-the-planet.)

We'd tried several times to find an acceptable plant-based substitute for our favorite sausage, but without much success. Most commercially produced vegetarian sausages are meant to mimic either highly spiced Italian sausage or chorizo; the only Polish sausage substitute we'd ever found was Tofurkey's, which left much to be desired in terms of both flavor and texture. We even tried making our own sausages from seitan, but while these were okay flavor-wise, they were far too dry to eat on their own.

Last night, however, Brian had a brainwave. It occurred to him that we didn't actually need to make big sausage links to replace the little pieces of sausage that we used to use in recipes like his cabbage dish. And since he had a bunch of little broken pieces left at the bottom of a bag of Butler Soy Curls, too small to use as a chicken or tofu alternative in a dish like Garlic Lemon Broccoli Pasta, they seemed like the perfect subjects to experiment on.

To give the soy curl fragments a sausage-like flavor, he simply soaked them in well-salted water with a touch of black pepper, Liquid Smoke, and — a surprisingly important addition — red food coloring. This gave the soy bits the pinkish color we'd expect from the cooked chunks of kielbasa in the original version of this dish, which helped trick our brains into expecting a sausage-like flavor from them. I was in my office working while Brian cooked up this creation, so I didn't know what had gone into it, and when I first tasted it, I couldn't figure out where he'd come up with such a plausible sausage substitute. I knew it wasn't real sausage, because we were all out of it, but it tasted so close to it that if I hadn't known, I might have thought he'd simply located a stray link in the back of the freezer.

Once Brian let me in on the secret, I could analyze the flavor a little more objectively, and I noticed one element that was missing: garlic. I suggested, and he immediately agreed, that the next time he tries this, he should add some to the soaking mixture for an even more kielbasa-like flavor. But even without the garlic, these soaked soy curls really provided the meaty chew and savor this dish needed. Mixed in with all the other flavors of cabbage, onion, apple, and caraway seed, they were almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

This recipe is still a work in progress, so it will probably improve as time goes by, but I think what we have now is good enough to be worth sharing. So, gentlefolks, I give you:

BRIAN'S SAVORY CABBAGE WITH VEGAN SAUSAGE

1. Dissolve 3/4 tsp. salt in 1/2 cup water. Add 2 grinds black pepper, 2-3 drops Liquid Smoke, and 1 drop red food coloring. (Note: for future versions of this recipe, Brian plans to add 1 clove fresh garlic and blend everything together with a hand blender, but we haven't tried that yet.) Zap the mixture in the microwave for 30 seconds.
2. Add roughly 1 ounce crushed soy curls, or enough to fill the container up to the water line. Soak for about 10 minutes, then squeeze out the excess liquid.
3. Fry the soaked soy curls in vegetable oil for about 5 minutes. Set aside.
4. To the same pan, add 1/2 red onion (chopped), 1/2 cabbage (sliced into thin strips), 1 apple (peeled and diced), 1 tsp. caraway seed, and an additional 1/2 tsp. salt. Cook until tender, then add the "sausage" bits back to the pan and heat through.

Serve with bread (preferably rye) or biscuits. Makes two generous portions, with a little bit left over.

You can also cook the veggies on their own, without the "sausage." This is good as a side dish, but not substantial enough for a main course.

This successful experiment has gone even further to confirm our appreciation for Butler Soy Curls. We've already discovered so many handy ways to use them (chili, lemon-garlic sauce, sesame sauce) that we're going through them at an alarming rate. After devouring our first bag of them, we bought a half-dozen more (the minimum order) from the Butler site, and we've already used up nearly two of those bags and given away a third. So, the next time we order, we've decided to go for the 12-pound bulk box. Brian hesitated to buy this big box the last time, since he feared we wouldn't have enough freezer space to store them all, but now that he's seen just how useful they are, he's willing to clear out some of the other things in the freezer (like our homemade veggie stock, which isn't that great anyway) to make room for them. Besides, at the rate we're going through them, we can store some of them in the fridge rather than the freezer and run no risk of having them go off before they're eaten.

Doing this will reduce the cost of the curls in their dry form to $5.41 per pound, even with shipping included. Since each pound of the dry curls cooks up to make about three pounds of meat substitute, that works out to about $1.80 per pound — less than we used to pay for the free-range chicken from Trader Joe's, and significantly less than the Amish-market sausage. So this new, tasty protein substitute will be not only earth-friendly, but economical as well — just what ecofrugality is all about.