I have mentioned in previous posts that some of Adam’s favorite meals I cook are those I remember from my childhood. This is one of them. I made it one evening fairly early on in our relationship. I was missing my family, and wanted something warm and comforting to eat. When I made this dish, I cooked for both of us, but I was unsure if Adam would enjoy (or even eat) the meal. To my surprise, he did enjoy it and TVP Sloppy Joe’s have made it into our cooler weather cooking rotation ever since.
TVP Reconstituted
These Sloppy Joe’s are made with TVP (textured vegetable protein), sometimes called soy crumbles. When I was a child, my mother belonged to a bulk health food buying club – specialty health food wasn’t quite as easy to come by in the grocery store then as it is now. I’m not sure what she was thinking when she placed the order, but one afternoon we ended up with a 25-pound box of TVP. To put that in perspective, TVP is a dehydrated ingredient, this recipe uses just ⅓ pound and makes four generous servings!
Veggies prepped for cooking
As a child, that box seemed bottomless – I thought we would never reach the end of it (in fact my sister and I had a little party after the last meal made with that TVP). Now, as an adult, it is an ingredient I crave when I am missing home.
Sloppy Joe sauce
I also add in a good dose of vegetables to this recipe. If you chop them up even smaller than I do and they almost disappear into the sauce. If you have a picky eater who tries to avoid their veggies, this might be a good way of sneaking them in! The recipe my mother used for TVP Sloppy Joe’s is lost to the ages, so for this recipe, I started with Domestically Creative’s Sloppy Joe recipe, and then switched the protein, jammed in a lot more veggies, and made minor adjustments to the sauce.
Sloppy Joe mix – immediately after combining all ingredients and after cooking for 20 minutes.
There are three critical parts to the Sloppy Joe’s from my childhood – sloppy joe mix, buttered rolls, and sauerkraut – leave out one component and you have a boring meal. Add them all together and you get a delicious, crave-worthy dinner. It might sound like a strange mix, but please don’t skip the magic ingredients – the buttered rolls and sauerkraut are what make this dish so delicious.
I use gluten-free rolls, but any thick slice of bread or roll will work (Adam who is not gluten-free loves to use thick slices of soft bread baked with everything bagel topping). This is not the place for a thin piece of sandwich bread, a pita, or flat-bread – you need something thick to soak up all the delicious sauce from this meal. And since the sloppy joe mix is made without meat and filled with veggies, I never feel guilty when putting a little extra butter on my bread or roll. And you shouldn’t either, you need the fat to help cut through the tang of the other ingredients.