Ragù con Sausage with Morningstar Farms® Meal Starters™ Sausage Style Recipe Crumbles

I have not been cooking enough lately. This is dangerous because when I do get a chance to cook, I go nuts. This became clear a couple of weeks ago when Donnie and I had the weekend off. We decided to spend it at home, which meant we could do a nice, quiet Sabbath dinner alone. Since Donnie and I have been doing a low-carb diet for the last couple of months (13 lbs and counting!), we hadn’t eaten pasta for weeks. We LOVE pasta. Being that it was our weekend off, we decided to break the rules and fudge on our diet for one meal. But if we were going to do this, we were going to do it right. I was not opening up a jar of tomato sauce. No, this meal would be in house, start to finish. Caprice salad, garlic bread, stuffed zucchini, pesto, whole wheat pasta and home made meat sauce. It ended up sounding as good as the grocery bill was expensive.

I’ve only made pasta sauce one other time and that was years ago so I had to start with a source I know and trust. Foodnetwork.com is a great place to get ideas for recipes. I’m a particular fan of Alton Brown. His recipes are usually fresh and different while still being simple to execute. I already knew I wanted to use Morningstar Farms version of sausage in the sauce, but the meat sauces I found called for at least 3 different types of meat and a lot of unnecessary steps so I decided to adapt a tomato sauce recipe instead.

Donnie isn’t a huge fan of Morningstar Farms® Meal Starters™ Sausage Style Recipe Crumbles (could they possibly come up with a longer name?). My theory is that it’s because they actually sort of taste like meat, which Donnie did not grow up eating. They have a pretty bold flavor and they’re spicy as well. The soft but chewy texture along with the peppery bite make them a great substitute for sausage in both Italian and breakfast dishes. Donnie loved the sauce and used the crumbles the other day in an egg and hash brown scramble (I’ll have to blog that later on), so I think he’s been converted.

The nutritional info is similar to most other veggie meats. Let’s just start with the fact that each 2/3 cups serving has 420 mg of sodium. That’s a lot of sodium. On the other hand, since the sausage crumbles have such a strong flavor, you can get away with using less. You definitely won’t get a whole serving of crumbles in each serving of sauce. Now that we have the sodium out of the way, we can breath a sigh of relief since these contain no saturated or trans fats, are low in carbohydrates and have 11 grams of protein per serving. Not only that, but they even threw in some healthy portions of Thiamin, Niacin and Vitamin B12. Thanks guys. Don’t feel bad about throwing these crumbles into a recipe; just don’t use the whole bag (which replaces 1 lb of real uncooked sausage, by the way).

But back to the sauce, it’s easy as can be and will make your house smell like Heaven, if there’s Italian food in Heaven, that is.

Ragù Grosso con Morningstar Farms® Meal Starters™ Sausage Style Recipe Crumbles

Serves 3-4

12 roma tomates, halved

8 baby portabella mushrooms, halved

¼ c extra virgin olive oil

2 scallions, finely diced

2-3 cloves garlic, pressed or minced

1 Tbls fresh oregano, finely chopped

1 Tbls fresh thyme, finely chopped

salt and pepper

¾ c white wine

1 c Morningstar Farms Meal Starters Sausage Style Recipe Crumbles

Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.

In a baking dish, place tomato and mushroom halves cut side up. Sprinkle with oil, scallions, garlic, herbs and salt and pepper to taste.

Bake for 2 hours. Check the tomatoes after 1 hour and turn down the heat if they seem to be cooking too quickly. Then turn the oven to 400 degrees and bake another 30 minutes.

Remove from the oven and transfer to a saucepan. Mash ingredients together with a potato masher. Add white wine and sausage crumbles, bring to a boil, reduce heat to low and cook for 5 minutes.

Tips: This sauce is really think and chunky. If you prefer something more… saucy, I guess, try adding some vegetable broth or a bit of tomato juice. You can also whiz the ingredients up in a blender after they come out of the oven (before you add the wine and sausage). If you don’t have fresh herbs and you don’t want to buy them, you can substitute a tsp of the dried versions. If the tomato skins bother you, just pull them off with your fingers after they come out of the oven before mashing. Although I paired this with linguini, a chunky sauce really goes best with a short, stout pasta like penne, ziti or radiatore. That said, it will taste good with anything. Especially a caprese salad.