It's practically health food!

We've secretly replaced their usual pork sausage with veggie 'sausage'.  Let's see if they notice!

I have a great workplace.  Every Friday at 9:30AM we have a potluck breakfast.  There are four teams and we rotate.  This week is my first time participating and I volunteered to bring biscuits and gravy.  I already have a few people who are very excited about this.  I don't know if anyone's ever brought biscuits and gravy.   I LOOOVE biscuits and sausage gravy.  It's probably my most favorite southern dish.


Problem is, I can't leave well enough alone.  I have no idea if there are any vegetarians or religious abstainers of pork at work.  Some weeks there aren't any meats served at all and we just have a plethora of bread and sweets.  So when there is protein, it's usually not vegetarian, to my knowledge anyway.

Biscuits and gravy is an innately fattening and artery clogging manna from heaven, so why not lighten it up a bit? It's GRAVY ON BUTTERY BREAD.  Come on!  We have a few calories to spare here. I'm not lightening the biscuits, just so you know.  I don't want them to be hockey pucks.  Though, I will be using Spectrum non-hydrogenated shortening, so, yay! no trans fats.

I will not be responsible for killing my coworkers. 

So, tonight, I tested out Gimme Lean sausage (available near the tofu at your local grocer's) in sawmill gravy. I've never had this brand before.  I very much enjoy Morningstar Farms breakfast sausage patties, but using that would be rather expensive and tedious since they're already little patties.  Did I mention that about 150 people work at my company?  I have no idea how many people come to breakfast, but it's a lot.  Luckily, each breakfast team has about 15 people so each serving can be very small.  Anyways, the verdict?  Very yummy!  I followed Alton Brown's recipe for regular sawmill gravy where you brown your sausage, dump it out of the pan and then make a milk gravy from the fat and fond.  In this case, I browned the 'sausage' in olive oil and then added more olive oil when I made the roux for the gravy.   I did end up browning the 'sausage' some more in a non-stick pan (to keep the fond on the meat and not on the pan).  During this browning, I adding a pinch of sage and crushed fennel seed along with salt and pepper to give the fake meat a stronger, more breakfast sausage-like flavor.

Nobody knows my plan to bring a vegetarian dish and frankly, I'm a little nervous.  While I don't really care what people think about my cooking, I really hope people like it.  I hope they don't get all disappointed when they find out there is no pork in this crockpot.

Luckily, nobody at work knows whether or not I can cook at all...

Food Festival in Richmond

Ages ago, on June 6th, I went to Richmond, Va to visit my bestest friend in the whole wide world because I love her and she's my favorite and she's beautiful and smart... and Oh yeah, there was a food festival that weekend!

 Grace!  Ain't she a doll?

The event was called Broad Appetit.  Over 50 Richmond restaurants participated.  There were booths for blocks and each generous plate or portion was only $3.  Here are my favorites:

First up was dessert!  These were the first great macarons I've ever had.  These are soft, tender cookies with a crisp outershell sandwiching a creamy middle.  Typically the cookies are made of ground almonds, but these particular ones also contained hazelnut and pistachio meal. 

On the left was the Passionfruit with Milk Chocolate and on the right was Pistachio and Bittersweet Chocolate.  Both were to perfectly structured (crisp shell, good feet, tender middles) and utterly delightful.   I wouldn't expect anything less from someone trained by Pierre Herme himself.  However, I preferred the Passionfruit for its intensity.  It was tart! and I wasn't expecting that from a cookie. 

 

They come from Petites Bouchees.  The owner, Veronica also has a blog where I learned that she is also Filipino!  Very inspiring :)  

 

We had so much fantastic food!  There was a salmon reuben, samosa, fried green tomatoes, Thai flavored pork belly, soft shell crab sandwich, goat cheese filled fried squash blossoms, grapefruit tartlet, and grilled lamb.  

 

 

Mmmmm...food memories.  Unfortunately, I'm a terrible Richmonder (mostly because I live 2 hours away), and I really didn't pay attention to where all this food came from. I guess I'll just have to go back again and again and again.  Pity. Ha!

Speaking of where food comes from my favorite vendor at the festival (other than Petite Bouchee) didn't even cook anything at all.  This school bus is a farmers market on wheels called Farm to Family. The bus makes trips all over town and stop mostly at school parking lots.  And they just recently opened up a real store.  I'm friends with them on Facebook and all of their updates make me wish I lived in Richmond just so that I could shop there.  The concept is just so fantastic - everybody, regardless of what part of town you live in, should have access to good, fresh, local food. 

I bought a box of strawberries from farmer/ bus driver, Mark.  The day was hot, so the fragrance of these sweet gems were just too overpowering and I succumbed.  They were a perfect ending to a delicious day.