Grandma's Vege-Chicken Casserole

At the end of the holiday season, you get a lot of stuffing mix on sale at the grocery store. So here's something you can do with all that stuffing. It makes a casserole that's tasty with leftover cranberry sauce.It's based on a Betty Crocker chicken casserole recipe that some grandmother or other made up for a quickie way to stretch out some leftover chicken.  It's perfect for making a large dish from a can of veggie-chicken.

Ingredients:

• 1 can Loma Linda Chik'n Chunks, Worthington Fri-Chik, Worthington Diced Chik, Loma Linda Fried Chik'n
• 1 can cream of mushroom or cream of celery soup
• 1 package stuffing mix bread crumbs (don't use the spice mix unless the bread crumbs are unflavored)
• 1/4 cup melted butter or margarine
• 1/4 to 1/2 cup grated cheese. 

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F.   
2. Place diced vege-chicken in a bowl with stuffing bread crumbs and mushroom soup and mix it up evenly with melted butter.
3. Spread mixture over the bottom of an ungreased 13 x 9-inch baking dish. 
4. Top with shredded cheese. 
5. Bake 35 to 40 minutes or until bubbly.

Serving Suggestion:

This is one of those make it on Friday and take it to potluck on Sabbath dishes. It reheats well AND it actually tastes better the next day.This is your basic cover it with foil potluck dish; great for reheating.

© 2015 by Tom King

Sheila's Famous Semi-Secret Vege-Chicken Salad Recipe

Vege-Chicken Salad on my favorite Oatnut Bread

I have a recipe for vege-chicken salad that even carnivores will love.  - SK

INGREDIENTS:  

• 1 box of chick nuggets from Morning Star. 
• 2 boiled eggs
• 1/2 cup Mayonnaise
• 1/2 cup Miracle Whip
• 1/2 chopped onion
• 1/2 chopped bell pepper
• 1/2 cup chopped celery
• 1/2 cup sweet relish 
• 1 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tsp celery seed

Directions:

1. Boil two eggs. Cool them down, peel and grate and set aside.
2. Finely chop up vege-chicken nuggets. It must be the Morning Star kind of nuggets and it must say "nuggets" not patties on the box. These should stay frozen until ready to use then you can thaw in the M/W just long enough to thaw but still be a little cold. I like to use a food processor to grind them up but if you don't have a processor you can use a plain grater.
3. Add grated egg to nuggets and mix up.
4. Add 1/2 to 1 cup Mayo and 1/2 to 1 cup Miracle Whip and mix well.
5. Chop into small pieces 1/2 onion, 1/2 bell pepper. and I/2 cup celery.  Add them to the mixture.
6. Add 1 tsp garlic powder, 1 tsp celery seed. Stir into mixture.
7. Add 1/2 cup sweet pickle relish and mix everything well.  

Serving Suggestions:

You are all done! Serve as sandwich spread or as a dip for Christmas with Ritz type crackers. I never add any extra salt but you may want to use garlic SALT or table salt. I promise it's so tasty too!

Sheila King © 2015

Note from Tom:  

This vege-chicken salad is one of our family's favorite picnic treats. It's easy to transport in a big Tupperware container and make sandwiches out of when you get there. Everybody who's ever tasted it raves about the stuff. 

It's also a quite forgiving recipe. Even I can make it. You can vary the amounts of ingredients to taste. If you take out the celery, just add more celery seed. If you take out the onions, just add some onion powder. If you don't like bell pepper, well you're just a Philistine is all.  - Tom

Vege-Pigs in a Blanket

Here we have the Adventist vegetarian take on "Pigs in a Blanket". This is an easy breakfast potluck or a fun dish to add some variety to a traditional Sabbath potluck.  Better yet, it's easy to make. Here's how.

Ingredients:

• Biscuit dough (I make my own, but you can use canned biscuits as well). You can also use Crescent roll dough as well.
• Worthington Saucettes,  Worthington Super Links, Worthington Vege-Links, Loma Linda Big Franks, Loma Linda Linkettes, Loma Linda Little Links, Morning Star Farms Sausage Links
• Cheddar or American cheese

Directions:

1. Roll out your biscuit dough flat - a quarter to half inch thick.  Cut in strips a little less wide than the links you are using as shown above.
2. Place vege-link (whichever kind you want to use) on the strip of dough as shown. The Saucettes, Little Links and Sausage Links give it a more breakfasty taste. If you want this for a lunch or supper, you can make bigger blankets for the longer vege-weiners. It's like pre-made hot dogs.
3. Place a strip of cheese beside the link.  You can use pretty much any cheese variety you want - even tofu cheese if you want to go full vegan.
4. Roll the link and cheese in the dough, cut the roll loose and press the end into the dough to hold it together as shown in the picture. 
5. Bake at 350° until it the dough cooks brown on top and the cheese melts as shown in the photo at the top.

Serving Suggestions:

You can serve this with breakfast food like cereal or scrambled eggs or hash browns for a breakfast potluck. You can also serve them like hot dogs with beans, potato salad, corn and fried potatoes. You might even try these for a Pathfinder fund-raiser.

© 2015 by Tom King

Ranch Fried Vege-Chicken

I like cranberry sauce with vege-fried chicken even if it's not Thanksgiving.

This is more of Sabbath Dinner special than it is a potluck unless you have a lot of big cans of Fri-Chick or Chicken Patties.  This is a really simple to do recipe, especially if you aren't adept at frying chicken already.  Here's how it works.

Ingredients:

• Loma Linda Fried Chik'n, Worthington Fri-Chik, Morningstar Farms Vegetarian Chicken Patties, or Loma Linda Chicken Patties
• Eggs
• Flour
• Ranch salad dressing seasoning mix (powdered)
• Olive Oil or vegetable oil

Directions:

1. Scramble eggs in a bowl with a wire whisk
2. Add flour and Ranch salad dressing seasoning to a second bowl and whisk together lightly. Don't use the entire seasoning envelope. A tablespoon or two should work nicely.
3. Remove vegetarian chicken from can or package and pat the pieces dry with paper towels.
4. Set up your frying pan and heat oil till it's ready to add the chicken.
5. Dip the dried vege-chicken in the egg wash, then in the flour and seasoning mix, then place in the hot oil.  Cook till brown, turning once.

Serving Suggestion:

That's it.  After you've fried up a bunch of these, serve with the rest of your meal.  I love vegetarian chicken with mashed or baked potato, some peas, pea salad, or some other vegetable. A green salad goes well with Ranch Vege-Chicken. I love vegetarian baked beans with it too.


© 2015 by Tom King

Shepherd's Pie Variations

LL Taco Filling Shepherd's Pie

There are a lot of ways to do Shepherd's Pie. This is a super-easy one for a potluck. You may have to show people how to fix it on their plates, but it's really a tasty one dish meal much like that SDA staple - the haystack.

There are a variety of vege-meats that work for this dish. You can even use plain textured vegetable protein if you season it up like vegeburger.  Ultimately the barbecue sauce give it the flavor. This dish is really three in one and has always been a King family favorite. You can even fix it up for people so they don't have to assemble it. It's up to you. I like to make mine from separate bowls of potatoes, vegeburger and mixed vegetables. Here's how it works.

Ingredients for Taco Filling version (without mashed potatoes ingredients)

 
Ingredients:

• Mashed potatoes - (See "Mama's Mashed Potatoes")
• Frozen or canned mixed vegetables
• Loma Linda Taco filling, Loma Linda Beefless Chunks, Loma Linda Redi-Burger, Morningstar Farms Recipe Crumbles, Worthington Vege-Burger
• Bulls-Eye or KC Masterpiece barbecue sauce.
• Tomato Sauce (for the Loma Linda Taco Filling version)

Directions:

1.  Make up a big pot of Mama's Mashed Potatoes or fix some up your favorite way.
2.  Heat up a big pot of mixed vegetables or put together your favorite mixed veggies (peas, carrots, corn, green beans, Lima beans, etc.).
3.  In a large skillet pour in your vegemeat straight out of the can or bag. If you use the LL Beefless Chunks, pour off some of the gravy.  Brown the vegeburger or chunks or crumbles till it looks well cooked.  With the Taco Filling version, add a little tomato sauce to take down the Mexican spices a little bit before you add the barbecue sauce and cook it in a little bit.)
4.  Pour barbecue sauce into the vegemeat to make a kind of barbecue gravy.
5.  Set the skillet out on the counter alongside the mashed potatoes and mixed veggies in this order - potatoes, barbecue vege-meat, and mixed veggies.
6.  If you'd rather make it as a single dish, do this.  In a large casserole or two or three if you make a lot, put a bunch (that's a technical term used by famous chefs) of mashed potatoes into the casserole to make a bed for the other ingredients. Then spoon a layer of barbecued vege-meat and a layer of mixed veggies.  Cover with foil and you can reheat it in the warmers at church as a single casserole dish.

The LL Beefless Chunks version of shepherd's pie.

This is a really tasty dish and one of those King Family favorites. It's in our cookbook.  This is another one that people will scrape the dish clean. The picture to the left is made with either Morningstar Farms Recipe Crumbles or NEAT burger or any other brand of vegeburger. The Recipe is in my Sept. 1, 2016 blog. I have forseen it!   ;-)

© 2015 by Tom King

Vege Pene Stroganoff

Add some veggies and garlic bread and you've got a nice supper.

This is admittedly an adaptation of a more traditional stroganoff recipe. The beautiful thing about what our forefathers used to call "made" dishes is that there is room for adapting the recipe to what you've got on hand.  This can be made with almost any sort of pasta you want. I chose pene pasta because I was out of egg noodles, but it works either way. It works with several types of vege-meats. This one is pretty adaptable.

Ingredients:

• Loma Linda Choplets, Loma Linda Vegetable Steaks, Loma Linda Beefless Chunks, or Worthington Vegetable Steaks,
• Chopped onions
• Pene pasta, rotini or egg noodles
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/2 cup sour cream
• 1/8 cup evaporated milk
• Mushrooms
• 1 Tbsp flour
•  Butter, margarine, olive oil
• Parmesan cheese
• Small can of sliced olives

Directions:

Get a great big bowl for mixing the pasta. It's very messy as you can see!

1. Cook the pasta according to directions. Should be slightly al dente'. Drain and set aside.
2. While the pasta is cooking, drain the juice from the Vegetarian meat can into a bowl and set aside.
3. Brown Beefless Chunks in butter, margarine or olive oil. If you use Choplets or Vegetable Steaks, cut them into strips before browning.
4. Put browned vegetarian meat into large mixing bowl.  Use the skillet to saute the onions and mushrooms. When ready, add to browned vege-meat in the big bowl.
5. In skillet add tablespoon or so of flour and stir into olive oil. Heat till it starts to thicken. Add the liquid from the vege-meat can and allow it to thicken slightly. Add evaporated milk, sour cream and allow to thicken again. Add water to the sauce till it thickens again. Add water a little at a time till you have a nice saucy consistency. 
6. Pour the pasta into the big bowl with the vegetables and the vege-meat. Mix and then add the sauce. Stir in olives and you're done.

As I said you can use several different noodle-like pasta types and any of several beefish vege-meats. Choplets probably make the best stroganoff dishes. It's pretty easy to make, sits well overnight, travels well and is easy to expand to makes lots and lots of delicious pasta.  Sprinkle a little Parmesan on it when you serve it up and it's really nice.

How cool is that?

Tom King
(c) 2015

King Hacienda Taco Enchilada Bake

I call this the King Hacienda Taco Enchilada Bake to differentiate from the King Ranch (no relation) dishes I’ve been posting.  So that you do not confuse this example of Tex-Mex cuisine with that developed on the famed South Texas Rancho Deluxe, let me specify that the King Hacienda is rather less imposing.  We are the other King Family enterprise which consists of a pair of Texas ex-pats living up here in liberal Washington State. It's a sumptuous 1 bedroom hacienda located over a garage deep in a South Puyallup cottonwood swamp, just an ash cloud’s throw from Mt. Rainier where Sheila lives with her husband, Tom and Daisy the Wonder Dog.

You may notice that my King labeled dishes tend to have a certain cheesy quality to them. If you object to cheese, you are certainly free to use grated tofu, grated soy cheese or anything else you can find that’s of a cheesy texture and which melts. It is my own belief that cows are quite proud of their cheddar products and don’t mind me using them to create Tex-Mex dream dishes for celebratory purposes.

The King Hacienda Taco Enchilada Bake is a lovely dish that I based on a Krysten Schwartz recipe on tastykitchen.com.  I simply vegetarianized it. The recipe doesn’t call for a lot of spices. I use Loma Linda Taco Filling which is already spiced up. The rest of the flavors come from the ingredients, which are as follows:

Ingredients:

• Small can or ½ large can of Loma Linda Taco Filling
• ½ large onion diced
• 2 cups grated cheddar cheese
• ½ cup sour cream
• ½ cup Picante sauce
• Small can tomatoes and green chiles (Rotel mild)
• 10 corn tortillas

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees
2. Carmelize diced onions in skillet then add taco filling and brown
3. In small bowl mix sour cream, tomatoes & green chiles and Picante sauce
4. Spray the bottom of a 9x12 casserole dish with spray cooking oil and add a few little dabs of Picante sauce.
5. Lay 3 or 4 corn tortillas over the bottom of the casserole dish
6. Add a layer of cooked onions and taco filling
7. Spoon in a layer of the sour cream/picante/chiles mix
8. Add a layer of grated cheddar
9. Add a second layer of tortillas. (Tortilla chips will work too, but will make the dish saltier)
10. Add the rest of the taco filling and onions
11. Add the rest of the sour cream/picante/chiles mix
12. Top with cheddar cheese and bake at 350 degrees until bubbly. If you are going to reheat it for potluck the next day, pull it out before it browns on top, then heat until the cheese starts to brown on top just before serving.

Note:  This is a great way to use up leftover vege-taco meet after a taco supper or something. I can also get two of these enchilada bakes out of a single large can of Loma Linda Taco Filling – a nice contribution to a big potluck. This dish is even better if you make it the day before. The flavors permeate through the dish and give you a lovely panoply of tastes in every bite.

Have a Happy Potluck!

Tom & Sheila King

© 2015