Muffins and Sausages

My girlfriend Sarah (wait?  does she mean girlfriend?) recently worked on a commercial shoot that involved craploads of fresh fruit... which wound up in my fridge!  It was a little overwhelming for a bit there: tons of strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries, ten mangos, two pineapples, and ten bananas.

But, freezers are our friends!  I washed, trimmed, chopped, and froze almost all of it--the equivalent of many dollars of frozen fruit, just waiting for smoothies, pies, curries, breads, etc.  Yay!

First thing I did with the fruit that didn't get frozen was make some muffins... I used the recipe for berry muffins in Vegan Brunch, but too much multitasking was going on, and I know I messed it up somehow (3 c of flour instead of 2, maybe?), because I had to add a LOT of milk to get batter consistency.  I know using fresh berries instead of frozen also affects the cooking time, but it was more than that.  I wasn't thrilled about the results (though Sarah said they were just fine), but we nevertheless ate them or gave them away quickly enough that I didn't get a decent photo.

Muffin Carnage

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Pancakes from Vegan Brunch have also continued to happen, with great success.  Sometimes they have blueberries in them.

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On the topic of breakfast, I recently made an impulse buy at wholefoods and got a pack of Field Roast's Italian sausages.  Now, I pretty much never buy "fake meat products" (tofu and tempeh are different, since they have one ingredient).  But I looked at the list of ingredients and thought, I could make this exact sausage at home.  It's simply wheat gluten, vegetables, and spices.  So that's cool... and the sausages taste really great... but they sort of sit in the bottom of my stomach for hours, as if my body isn't sure it can actually digest them.  Is it a gluten thing?  I'm inclined to pooh-pooh the hordes of upper-middle-class white people who only as of very recently imagine that gluten has singled them out as torture victims (as if insisting on soymilk and egg-whites-only-omelettes was no longer enough to make them special)... but yeah, something about these sausages doesn't sit well with me.  Not that this keeps me from ordering one (at a 500% markup) every time I go to Blue Palms for happy hour.

Still, unless I'm feeling really lazy, I could make my own.  Or I could skip the gluten bomb altogether and return to my standbys of tempeh sausage filling, tempeh sausage triangles, and the amazing oat and rice sausage.

Field Roast Italian Sausage, lightly fried, with sprouted rye bread and raspberry jam in the background

And yes, I know the title of this post is "muffins and sausages."