It's been a while I know - sorry about that, we have had a lot going on - not least of all organising and preparing to emigrate in March next year and lots of things associated with that.
Anyway, I have a number of recipes ready to go on here and now I just need to get round to posting them. Those that I post now will be my own take on various recipes, usually using quorn or other veggie products. I love to create veggie versions of traditional dishes and proving that they can be equally tasty and I promise I will get back on the horse and start posting again!
So, as the days are getting shorter and the nights are closing in I have been using my slow cooker - A LOT!! I love being able to bang stuff in there in a morning, leave for work and come home to a fantastic, aromatic dish all ready to serve. I use my slow cooker for meat stews quite often and decided to wing it with a quorn sausage casserole, it turned out brilliantly and therefore I share it with you here.
The beauty of this recipe is also that you can ad-lib with whatever you have to hand, I used mushrooms, sweet potato, onions and some borlotti beans but you can use whatever veg and/or pulses you have to hand to bulk it out. This is a wonderfully hearty dish and makes 4 large, filling portions.
I used a packet sausage casserole mix but completely ignored all the instructions etc and just used it as a shortcut to a casserole base. You could also stick this all in a standard casserole dish for around 60 mins on about 180 degrees (for a fan oven) and achieve the same result.
Here goes:
In your slow cooker place two chopped onions, your quorn sausages, whatever veg you fancy (I used mushrooms and a large sweet potato), a tin of beans/chick peas (I used borlotti) and a tin of chopped tomatoes.
Fill the empty tomato tin with boiled water out the kettle and then stir the sausage casserole mix into this and sling it in the slow cooker, half fill the tin again and chuck that in too.
Add either a stock cube or stock pot in and stir everything together thoroughly (I used a knorr veg stock pot).
Switch the slow cooker to low for 8 hours or high for 4 hours and leave.
About an hour before you want to eat your casserole you can add some veggie dumplings by mixing 50g atora veg suet with 100g self raising flour and binding with 5-6 tbsp of cold water. Make a soft dough and split into 8 pieces then roll each piece into a ball and sit on top of your casserole. My husband is always starving (he runs a lot) and hence you will notice from the photo below that there are more than 8 dumplings - I do one and a half times the dumpling recipe to make it 3 dumplings per portion and try to fill his hollow legs. The propoints values below are based on this so if you only make 8 dumplings you can knock a point or 2 off the total (I haven't calculated it so this is a guesstimate).
Casserole with dumplings in towards the end of cooking (I promise that is not a deliberate placement of the Quorn cookbook, that's just where it lives!).
A hearty portion of casserole.
And there you have it! No added fat in this dish at all (aside from the suet in the dumplings) and it tastes amazing! I serve it either on its own as it is incredibly filling but my other half mops up the tasty juice with crusty bread. This recipe makes 4 substantial portions.
On it's own the weight watchers propoints value of each portion of this casserole is 14 (so a sufficient meal anyway!) broken down as follows: quorn sausages (4), beans (2), sweet potato (2), suet (2), flour (2), stock pot (1), casserole mix (1).
