little baby sloppy joes

So I had been promising Miss Z that we would make thumb print cookies. What could be more fun than sticking your fingers in dough? Miss Z, ever ready for a culinary project jumped right in. She was very adamant that I take a particular picture of her doing the cooking. You can see my several tries here. She was quite exasperated that Mommy just couldn’t get it right. The one where she is squishing down the dough in the glass dish is a technique she refers to as "flatting the dough".

But the cookies turned out awesome. We got more creative than adding your standard jelly to our thumbprints. We did some jelly, but also apples sauce, peanut butter, chocolate chips and my personal favorite (Miss Z's genius idea) of marshmallow and chocolate (not seen in this photo).

I also got around to using the mini burger buns last night. They were great- soft, but dense enough that they did not fall apart on us while we were slurping up our delicious vegetarian sloppy joes. I have to just type in the recipe that I printed out because I can’t find the link. Whoever you are out there in internet land, sorry I can’t remember where I found you. Your buns are delicious (get your mind out of the gutter).

Whole Wheat Hamburger Buns

1 cup+ 3 tblsp warm water
1/3 cup canola oil
¼ cup sugar or honey
2 tablespoons yeast (I used two packets)
1 tsp salt
1 egg beaten
3 ½ cups whole wheat flour

Combine the water, yeast, oil and sweet stuff and let rest for 15 minutes.
Add the salt, egg and flour to the yeast mixture and mix well.
Roll out the dough ¾ in. thick and cut into rounds
Place rolls on cookie lightly greased cooking sheet ( I always use parchment paper instead)
Bake at 400-425 for 8-10 minutes. Be careful not to overbake or they will be too dry.

I also took my first stab a using dehydrated TVP for this recipe. For those of you who are unfamiliar, TVP is textured vegetable protein. If you have eaten any of those commercially produced “fake meat” products that are out there like veggie burgers and faux chicken nuggets, then you have probably eaten TVP. I got it as a bag of granules that had to be rehydrated. After much internet research, I cobbled together an idea of how I was going to do it. This is a mish mash of me and the sloppy joe recipe from Heavenly Homemakers (forgive my lack of measurements. I am very much an eyeball it cook).

1 onion
2 cups dehydrated TVP granules (or you could substitute 2 pds of ground beast)
2 cups water (you won’t need the water if you are using beast)
1 cup ketchup
1 tsp mustard
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
Garlic
Chili powder
Olive oil

I put the tvp in a skillet with the diced onion, some garlic powder and some olive oil and sautéed until the onions were getting soft and the tvp started to brown. Then I little by little added the water. It may have ended up a bit less than two cups because I just added until I got the texture I wanted.
Then I added the rest of the ingredients, including a little bit of extra garlic powder and stirred it up till heated through.
I didn’t find I needed any salt because the Worcestershire sauce and the ketchup are pretty salty already.

Then I spooned it onto the split buns and slurped it up. I didn’t tell hubby it was fake meat and he didn’t seem to care (To be perfectly honest, he has become accustomed to my sneaky meat swaps. I was a vegetarian off and on for many years and I still don’t really like to cook or eat much meat).

Yummy, yummy!