Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Tonight's Dinner: White Bean, Spinach and "Sausage" Ragout

This meal came together much more quickly than I thought it would, and it was very very good.

A friend pointed me to the recipe, which came from Cooking Light. Although the recipe isn't vegan, I was able to veganize it easily by doing the following:

• Substituted three Tofurky Sweet Italian Sausage links for the sausage.
• Substituted vegetable broth for the chicken broth.
• Substituted baby spinach for the escarole.
• I also omitted the rosemary and subsituted a dry red wine for the white, but that was just because I didn't have those ingredients on hand.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Tofurky sausage -- I actually liked it better than I remember "real" sausage. I was glad to note that it doesn't cook down as much as meat sausage does, and so you don't need to use as much.

And, in keeping with my quest to broaden my nutritional yeast horizons, I sprinkled a little on my ragout. It was, in fact, very much like parmesan and went well with the dish. Hooray! (A little goes a long way, though.)

Owing to the fact that the Tofurky sausage is kind of pricy and only infrequently available around here, I don't know how often I'll be making this. Even so, this was quick, healthy and tasty -- a definite success.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I used spinach in place of escarole too - it wilts nicely in the ragout. How did it taste with the red wine? I usually much prefer the red stuff to the white, but we actually had white around (from mushroom risotto... mmm, post that soon) and it pleasantly surprised me.

cmo

the everyday vegan said...

The red didn't give it as much of a "red" flavour as I thought it would -- which was good -- but I did use a dry red cooking wine, so that might have been why. I'm pretty sure a white that people are actually supposed to drink would be better, but I'd definitely make it again with the red if I didn't have a white around.