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...