I'm still not convinced that vegetarians should be trying to make meatless versions of things that were meat-based to begin with, but there are a lot of meat substitutes out there. The question is, what to do with them?
Gimme Lean is a hamburger substitute that is meant to be made into things, as opposed to the crumbles of Morningstar Farms and others that are more free-form. We used it for the first time for
Oktoberfest, where Nathaniel mixed in herbs based on standard sausage recipes, and cooked it in beer.
I have to admit to just doing a Google search to try to find vegetarian meatloaf recipes that used Gimme Lean for my first attempt. Since I have another tube of it in the fridge, I'll probably do the same thing for the second time around.
The recipe I used comes from the
Happy Herbivore blog, which looks to be a great resource of healthy vegan cuisine. I don't want to copy and paste the recipe here because it looks like she sells cookbooks, but please give her blog a visit!
The things I liked about this recipe - well, it is vegan, for one thing. I doesn't depend on cheese for flavor. It was easy to do and all the ingredients were things I always have on hand, apart from the Gimme Lean, of course. It baked evenly and would make great leftovers as well. The horseradish was great!
The things I liked less - it was too salty for me. I think if I make this recipe again, I might leave the soy sauce and not add the salt. I wish I had sprayed or greased the foil, because it really stuck to it, making it hard to cut and serve. I blame the lack of fat in the recipe, as opposed to what you would find in real meatloaf where it would probably slide right off. Just typing that makes me think the tradeoff is worth it.
If you have a favorite vegetarian meatloaf recipe, I would love to hear it. Apart from Gimme Lean versions, there seem to be a lot of lentil loaves out there. I'm sure one will find its way into this blog, despite the fact that certain members of my household are less than fans of the mighty lentil.
