Spaghetti with "Meat" Sauce

It was supposed to be spaghetti with meatballs, but after my meatless balls refused to stick together in the frying pan, it turned out to just be spaghetti with meat sauce. My loving husband assured me that even real meatballs are incredibly difficult to master (gee thanks), so why not just make it into a "meat" sauce? Way to salvage the situation!

This mid-production modification to our meal turned out to be actually be more amazing than I think meatballs would have been. The "meat" was dehydrated soy protein bits (beef flavor) from the health food store. This is what it looks like, and it is sold in bulk.

I covered 1 cup of the soy protein bits with boiling water and let it sit for 10 minutes.

To make the "meat" mixture, I added the following ingredients to the soy protein after it had absorbed all the water:

1 tsp garlic powder
1 tsp dried parsley flakes
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp Braggs liquid amino acids
1/2 tsp garlic salt
1 tsp black pepper
2 Tbsp flour.

Mix it all together.

Now, what I tried to do was make them into little balls and fry them on the electric skillet. This only somewhat worked. The outside of the balls got nice and crispy, while the inside remained mushy.

W came to the rescue with his meat sauce suggestion, so we just smashed the balls and fried up the whole mixture to make it all crispy. (We kept a couple of the balls for aesthetic purposes. Even though they were mushy on the inside, it's not like we were eating raw meat or anything! It's just soy, and it still tasted good!)

We then added the "meat" to the marinara sauce, and it was wonderful! I should have just thought of this in the first place!

Voila! Spaghetti and homemade vegan meat sauce!