Easy Yum- Homemade Vegan Sausages

Angela over at Harmony Hollow posted about making vegan sausage. She inspired me to get busy making my own this weekend. Oh my. How easy, how yum! And much cheaper for me than driving 2 hrs to Dallas to buy vegan sausage (and more fun too)!

The recipe mixes up in minutes. Form a log with a 1/2 cup of the mixture on a sheet of foil and roll it up like candy.

Steam them for thirty minutes. They doubled in size.

This recipe made 9 large sized sausages. Since I usually only use 1 or 2 sausages when cooking, I'm set for a while!

They are ready to eat right out of the steamer, but firm up even more when put in the fridge. Look at those lovely hunks of garlic. Next time, I'll add more.

The recipe I used from Julie Hasson is very open to variation. I did not use many of the spices listed in the recipe, but you do need to be liberal with whatever spices you use, the vital wheat gluten and chickpea flour have no real flavor. I've got some experimenting to do, I want to create a flavorful apple/potato/sage sausage.

Spicy Italian Vegetarian Sausages
Makes 8 links

2 1/4 cups vital wheat gluten
1/2 cup nutritional yeast flakes
1/4 cup chickpea flour
2 tbsp Bills Best Chik’Nish Seasoning (if using another brand which is salty, or saltier than Bill’s Best, you’ll want to greatly reduce the amount you use)
2 tbsp granulated onion
1 to 2 tbsp fennel seed, optional
2 tsp coarsely ground pepper, preferably freshly ground
2 tsp ground paprika
1 tsp dried chili flakes, optional
1 tsp ground smoked paprika
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp ground allspice
2 1/4 cups cool water
6 to 8 cloves garlic, minced or pressed
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp soy sauce

1. In a large bowl, mix together all of the dry ingredients. Whisk together the water, garlic, olive oil and soy sauce and using a fork, gently stir into the dry ingredients. Stir just until ingredients are mixed. If dough mixture is too dry, you can add another tablespoon of water or as needed.
2. Scoop 1/2 cup dough mixture at a time and shape into logs. Place logs on piece of aluminum foil and roll up, twisting ends. Place sausages in steamer and steam for 30 minutes. Once sausages have cooled, remove from foil and refrigerate until ready to eat. After cooling, the sausages may feel a bit dry on the outside. Don’t worry, as they will soften and firm up considerably after chilling.

Variation: You can shape the dough into little patties instead of links. If you don’t want to use aluminum foil, you can wrap the links in damp muslin or tea towel and tie ends with cotton twine.

Updating My Links

I've been adding links to my Favorite Links Pages on my sidebar. Different products, websites and information that has been helpful to us in pursuing country living, homeschooling and living a Christian life. I hope the links will be of benefit to you as well.

Garden Obsession

If you've read this blog for any length of time, I'm sure you've thought to yourself, "All Ann ever seems to do is talk about and work in that garden!" Yep, that's pretty much all I do. I'm a poor seamstress, and I'm not catching on to knitting and crochet. I tried scrapbooking, all of the supplies are gathering dust. I do read--gardening books. I love to cook and bake, but we don't need to eat that much! So, it's back to gardening.

If it stays warm for another week or so, we'll get a few more cucumbers.

The peppers won't stop blooming and producing!

I found this stray mullein plant in the backyard. I'm going to transplant it in a better place so we'll have plenty of leaves to dry for winter cough/cold remedies.

Gardening is so relaxing to me. I love fiddling in the dirt, babysitting the seedlings, preserving the harvest and thinking about what to plant next. There is always something new to do in the garden- some pest to fight, or weed to pull. The results are so rewarding and tasty! Right now, my fall/winter garden is looking kinda shabby, so I think I'll go obsess over it for a while.

Seed Catalogs

Get on the mailing list for seed catalogs now and you will have lots of happy winter reading.

A personal favorite seed company is Renee's Garden Seeds. I like the variety of unique seeds available and they have grown well for me both in California and here in East Texas. Many seed packets have more than one variety of seeds in them so you can try several new plants at the same time. Not all of the seeds are heirloom, so you do have to shop carefully.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. You HAVE to get this one! Chock full of amazing seeds from all over the world. This catalog gives you a chance to grow vegetables and fruits that your grandmother and great-grandmother would have grown, even if they came from Central America or Europe! I have received great service from this company. My sister attended their spring planting festival earlier this year and had a great time.



Peaceful Valley Farm and Garden Supply was just up the road from me when I lived in California. Their catalog features several lines of seeds, as well as beneficial insects, organic fertilizers and a myriad of other wonderful organic supplies. I actually keep their catalog by my bed for late night reading! They are taking orders now for bare root fruit and nut trees, berry canes , strawberries, artichokes and asparagus.

Seed Savers Exchange I ordered both seeds and seedling transplants from Seed Savers this year. The plants arrived healthy and strong and produced well. I ordered my seedlings in one batch this year, next year I'll space the arrival of the order out by two or three weeks. Be sure to order early, they run out fast!

Ronniger Potato Farm- I plan to order seed potatoes from this company, I've heard good things about them. They offer heirloom potatoes, and also sell garlic.

Start thinking now about what you want to plant, many seed companies ran out of popular varieties of seeds early in the season last year.

Our History Notebooks

Our history notebooks are a bit of a carryover from my teaching days. Our current notebooks are fairly simple compared to what I used to do, but I plan to increase the complexity of our notebooks as we move into the middle and high school levels.

The top two books are the children's notebooks, the bottom is my old sample history notebook from middle school world history.

We use our history notebooks as a place to store our gathered history information. It's a combination of lapbooking and notebooking right now. It's just a 70 page spiral bound notebook, the ones that are $0.10 at the start of the school year. It's easy to store in one large binder at the end of the year with the other notebooks we use for other subjects. So instead of using file folders for organizing the mini books in lapbooking, we just glue them on a page in the notebook. Same thing with notebooking pages. We also draw pictures, complete copywork and glue in puzzles, pictures,etc. in our notebooks.

Here's what we're going to start working on soon. Active reading skills. As the children read, I want them to comment on their reading, ask questions or make notes on the text that they are reading. Since I don't buy multiple copies of history texts and since we use lots of library books, it makes sense to make a copy of the text, paste it into our notebooks and then we can write all over the page. Learning to actively read non-fiction material is a major study skill close to the heart of this teacher.



Building a history notebook is fun. We're always on the lookout for something interesting to put in our books. We have great discussions or read-aloud time while cutting, coloring and gluing.

Most History pockets materials fit well in our notebooks, some of the larger items have to be drastically trimmed to fit. Lapbooking mini books and pockets fit with no problem.

In the future, I plan to do one notebook per time period. Our current notebook has a bit of both ancient history and American history. We had a few history hiccups and I just didn't want to waste half a notebook.

Homeschooling in November

Bible - Continuing our scripture memorization, we're working on Rev. 14. Preparing to start reading Lucy Miller, The Girl Who Waited for Jesus. It was my book as a kid, I'm happy I still have it!

Saxon Math - Moving along at a decent clip. We have the DVDs for independent lessons, but both children prefer to have one-on-one time with Mom teaching the lesson. That's okay with me.

Reading/Language Arts - Our main focus right now is to finish some historical reading on the American Revolution. Songbird and Sam the Minuteman. I've created some dictionary work, contextual reading work and writing to go along with these books. Then we're going back to our SDA readers (this series) for some reading comprehension practice, and our Daily Language Review book for grammar practice.


History- The American Revolution is nearly complete, we've watched Liberty's Kids and added some entries to our history notebooks. We'll spend a bit of time on an overview of the Constitution.

Science - This month includes a study of weather first, then rocks and minerals. I'm sure the hue and cry for a rock tumbler will increase.

Fine Arts- I think the rainy weather has come to an end, so it's time to get the watercolors out and record the Fall colors on paper. We are also preparing for a piano recital this month. The children will also be playing at least one piece each at the nursing homes that we visit on Sabbath afternoons.

Life Skills - A recent storm knocked over a tree, so we've got wood to split and stack for next winter. We also have plenty of garden work to do and make sure the animals have warm, secure homes for winter.