m. 24 "humble home-cooked" borlotti beans and homemade veggie sausages

dinner this evening involved something old and a lot of something new, we made this amazing jamie oliver recipe called "humble home-cooked" beans that used some of our fresh borlotti beans, we first made this last year and it was just as amazing this time as last time (we don't really cook much from jamie oliver, the patronizing attitude on some of his travel/cooking shows annoys us a little, although we're down with the whole school kids need to eat better thing) ...

and then there was the little matter of our experiment with making veggie sausage (pictured unflatteringly below):

sometimes it's hard to find well-crafted vegetarian food in the uk, the ubiquity of those "veggie burgers" in all kinds of takeaways that are effectively just potato patties with peas and carrot are a good example, so when you do find some good vegetarian food it is impossible not to become a little obsessed ... in oxford (a city that perhaps because of its resident tourist population has very little good everyday food) there is a small butchers in the old market called david john butchers that make maybe the best veggie sausages i have ever tasted, the website for the now closed big bang restaurant provides a little more hyperbole by suggesting that they are the "best vegetarian sausages the world over," way to go david john ...

like about two months ago, after we started making seitan and fake chicken, i started to think about how to "clone" the david john sausages, i spent a lot of time daydreaming about what it would take to replicate their mozzarella sausage (which i was a little disappointed to hear is not their most popular even though i think it is by far the most interesting of their 10 or so kinds of veggie sausage), and so tonight we experimented.

we had a pretty good sense of some of the ingredients: onion, carrot, mozzarella, some kind of tomato, and then maybe some flour and possibly bread crumbs and egg to bind it (m had the brilliant idea of adding some leftover brown rice as well) with maybe oregano and thyme, salt and pepper, the two primary questions were what kind of tomato is used and what do you do with the onions: cook them or leave them raw, we tried four different configurations:

1. raw onions, carrots, and tomatoes
2. sauteed onions, carrots, and tomatoes
3. raw onions and carrots with tomato puree
4. sauteed onions and carrots with tomato puree

every one of these worked, with the raw ingredients providing a little more flavor, something i didn't really expect, and the puree worked as well, although i think next time we are going to experiment with a basil tomato sauce, i can't wait ...

... but do david john's methods, whatever magic they contain, still produce the better sausage?  i think so.