TVP Sausage Crumbles--surprisingly good!

We recently added some new TVP items to our pantry to try out, from BePrepared.com (aka Provident Pantry).  Great folks to do business with, btw.  So no complaints on the transaction itself.

We had an older can of this in the pantry that had a code of some sort 09/03, which I took to be a month/year code though we did not buy it that long ago--maybe 5yrs ago?  Regardless, I knew the contents should be fine, but as the older can, it should be rotated (eaten) first.  Product reports on their website indicate about 1 year of storage life after you open the can, so that alleviates one concern I had, which was a short life after opening.  Plus if I want I can vacuum bag some and pop it in the freezer too.

Instructions were to place in a skillet and cover with water, simmering for 10min (until water is gone I guess).  I did this to about 1/3c dry sausage crumbles.  Note:  They're fairly tasty if chewy, in their non-hydrated state.  I covered them with some water and simmered until the water was gone.  I did add some onion flakes to the water, as I was planning on dumping a mess of scrambled eggs into the sausage.  Once the sausage was done, I dumped in the egg (with fresh ground pepper) mixture and cooked it all to done.

Monkey2 thought it looked good and begged a bite.  He said he liked it!  I ate the rest, and it WAS good.  Sausage had some texture (would've been better if I had dried them out a bit after rehydrating), and the flavor was good.  It tasted enough like sausage to convince my palate.  I don't as a rule, dislike TVP, especially if it is quality TVP (not the stuff they used to feed us in school!).  It did need a fair bit of salt to taste perfect to me, but I am a bit of a Salt Vampire....

Now to see if there are any gastric side effects to note, but that will take a few hours to percolate through the system.  Planning on testing this on Dave tomorrow!