Basic vegetarian rissoles

My gastronomical enthusiasm for supermarket minced steak (for my standard chile con carne dish) was dampened by the recent horse-meat affair. And vegetarian urgings emerged in my imagination. Unfortunately, such urgings remain largely cerebral, rather than making my mouth water. That's surely a cultural failing due to the fact that I've never really been initiated by friends, restaurants and fine cooking into the marvels of meals without meat. To be totally honest, I lived for years under the ridiculous illusion that vegetarians were weirdos with visceral links (maybe there's a better adjective than "visceral") to astrologists, alchemists, religious ascetics, Seventh-Day Adventists and six-day bike-riders. I imagined that you would only have to ingurgitate a few vegetarian dishes and you would soon find yourself refusing, not only pork, but alcohol and vaccinations. Retrospectively, I realize to what extent I've often "reasoned"—even as an adult—in a ridiculous mindless fashion, governed by a set of stupid superstitions, no doubt developed during my boyhood. So I hardly need to explain that I remain, for the moment, an uninspired and uninformed vegetarian cook: the equivalent of the proverbial husband in the kitchen who can't boil an egg.

Back in 2011, I was proud to have unfathomed, as it were, the secrets of a mythical meat dish from a Greek restaurant of my student years in Sydney [access]. Today, my culinary achievements, far more modest, are presented in the following dull photo, which would be rejected instantly by any self-respecting cooking magazine or website.

Here, there is no horse meat. Indeed, there is no meat of any kind whatsoever. My delicious rissoles are fake steaks, concocted out of soy protein and dried cereals (oats, wheat, etc).

I was interested to learn that it's easy to store such uncooked rissoles in the deep-freezer. And they can then be cooked easily and rapidly on an iron grill plate placed above my gas burners, with a little olive oil.

As you can gather from the presence of the two bottles in my photo, I tend to be a heavy-handed user of both Worcestershire sauce (like my Walker uncles out in Australia) and soy sauce... which explains why my vegetable mixture (deep-frozen product) has a blackish look. Basically, though, the above meal is unadulterated (clearly-identified ingredients), tasty and healthy.