It’s Valentine’s Day week, but it’s important to have some nourishing foods in the system before all the dreamy chocolate treats (despite all our recipes being pretty healthy compared to other treats out there)! So we present to you our one savoury recipe of this week, vegan sausage kale noodle soup, perfect as a hearty but easy-to-digest meal before the sugar rush.

Leung and I fell in love with the Field Roast sausages when we had a sample of them at the Veg Expo in Vancouver last summer. Neither of us like tofu dogs or any types of “imitation meat”, but these are super flavourful, doesn’t have a “fake meat texture”, and absolutely taste nothing like the rubbery soy meats you’d usually find at supermarkets. If they are available in your area where you live, try them out! My personal favourite is the smoked apple sage flavour, but since we ate all of those in the summer, we used Italian in this recipe which worked perfectly for this soup!

Soup and stews are always my go-to’s when it comes to weekday meals. They are so easy to shop for (just buy whatever is in season), easy on the budget (sale produce, always), easy to switch up, warming & hearty, and gets your veggies in without having to eat a salad. I’ve never been a salad type of girl; I find salads unappetizing and definitely not something I look forward to in a meal. Despite having had some pretty fancy gourmet salads in my life, I’ve never fancied eating raw spinach (makes my tongue feel really rough afterwards) or wild greens tossed with olive oil, balsamic, and sunflower seeds. Just not my cup of tea. Other types of heavy dressings and vinaigrettes aren’t any better. The only salad I truly enjoy eating is my own sweet mustard tahini kale salad; any other type and I probably won’t bother touching at a dinner party.

Instead, I’d rather have an equivalent large bowl of plain steamed or roasted broccoli any day.

So since I’m not an avid salad eater, I need other ways to get my veggie servings in ways I can actually enjoy and incorporate into my daily meals. Sandwiches just don’t work for an excessive person like me because I’m always too greedy and stuffs way too much veggies in my sandwich that it just loses the point of eating a compact lunch. A couple slices of cucumbers just won’t do it for me.

Come soups and stews. I don’t think there is ever a day where I don’t have some sort of stew or chopped up vegetable ready to be made into a soup/stew in my fridge. In all honesty, I am pretty boring in the wintertime and constantly eat beet stews; all my stews are pretty in pink. The deep magenta colour makes me happy! I will share my beet stew recipe soon, but for today, I have to share this super yummy soup recipe that I cannot wait to make over and over again because it was pretty dang delicious!

The field roast sausages really add a depth of flavour to this soup; vegan meat alternatives aren’t something I incorporate in my every day diet, but this makes a nice treat once in a while when you’re craving a more savoury and hearty meal. It’s almost bedtime as I’m writing this, my dinner has completely digested, and I’m really feeling the urge to make this tomorrow. I guess I’ll plan a trip to the grocery store so I can enjoy a pot of this again!