Crockpot Broccoli & Vegan Sausage

I love my Crockpot. As a single person the 4.5 quart size is perfect, it allows me to make dinner plus leftovers. Sometimes I have to be careful not to get carried away and make too much otherwise I won't be able to eat it all within a few days. I have this one from Target, it's nothing fancy, but works fabulously.

Before I had a crockpot, I had stumbled across crockpot365.blogspot.com and had forwarded it to my sister who had one, and soon she was raving about all the things she could make with it including recipes from the blog. Within a couple of weeks, I bought my own and I just love it. My sister & I frequent the above mentioned blog often for recipe ideas. Last night I was over at her house and I was starving, and I was about to cave in and order a pizza when she mentioned she had made a broccoli dish and if I wanted some of the leftovers. At first I was skeptical especially after having a couple of beers with my brother-in-law (yep, I used up 1 of my 3 alcohol days), and broccoli isn't generally my go-to culinary choice after a few beers but she served it to me over white rice and I added a little bit of soy sauce and it was actually really good! So good in fact that I went out and bought the ingredients today to recreate this magic in my kitchen ;)

It's basically the Broccoli With Toasted Garlic and Hazelnuts recipe from Stephanie O'Dea, my sister made it a full meal by adding Tofurkey Kielbasa (she's semi-vegetarian) and serving it over rice. I decided to try it over quinoa.

2 pounds of broccoli
1 cup of whole hazelnuts
2 lemons
2 Tbsp olive oil
9 cloves of garlic, minced
2 links Tofurkey Kielbasa Meatless Sausage
1/4 tsp Trader Joe's Everyday Seasoning (this stuff is the best, I swear)

Cut up the broccoli and sausage links into manageable pieces, stick it in the Crockpot. Then add the hazelnuts and garlic, and drizzle the lemon juice from the 2 lemons and the olive oil on top, and add the seasoning. Cook on low for 2-3 hours depending on how you like your vegetables cooked (I cooked them for about 2 hours and the broccoli was still a bit firm, but I like it that way).

Before

In the future I would use fewer hazelnuts and actually maybe less of everything, this made A LOT of food for just one person. But it is a really good vegetarian meal. It makes about 6-8 servings depending on how you split it up, at 6 servings it comes to approximately:

329 calories
22g carbs
23g fat
17g protein
290mg sodium
5g sugar

per serving.

Serving it with 3/4 cup of cooked quinoa adds 128 calories, 23g carbs, 2g fat, 5g protein, 1mg sodium and 2g sugar.

Served over quinoa

As for the January Challenge, on Thursday my knees were hurting a bit and I realized this happened to me last time I did Ripped in 30... and googling shows I'm not alone :( I don't want to give up though, so I'm going to try it again with some modifications. I am super sore from snowboarding yesterday, but I'm planning on starting the video again tomorrow.

Good night!