Try My Hot Salty Balls

I was walking in Greenpoint last winter with Laura and her boyfriend, and he asked if I was a vegetarian. I said that for the past month or so I had been trying to go back to vegetarianism, or pescetarianism anyway, since fish are not cute. I added that I had previously been vegetarian for about four years but that I had given up.

"Yeah," Laura said, "because of Will's mom's balls."

When Will and I were roommates I would occasionally go home with him, during which time his mom would try to tempt me with various meat dishes. "Are you sure you don't want a little piece of chicken?" she'd say, or "Doesn't this bacon look good?" It never worked, not until that one year when Will came back from seeing his family at Christmas, and his mom had sent a big bag of sausage balls.

Sausage balls are cholesterrific little mounds of artery-clogging goodness. My paternal grandmother used to make them all the time, up until her fourth or fifth heart attack. I can't ever turn them down. Once, when I was working at the UGA library, someone brought them for some office party we were having. The next day I came in to work and realized that we had forgotten to put the leftovers away. And when I saw the sausage balls, which had been left unrefrigerated for twenty-four hours, sitting on top of a desk, not even wrapped up, did I eat some more anyway? Oh, yes. Yes I did.

And so when Will brought these home and put them in our refrigerator, I forgot all about my family's history of heart disease. I forgot what pig farming does to the environment. I forgot about Babe. By morning, I wasn't a vegetarian anymore.

I mentioned this to Chris, who pointed out that they could probably be made with soysage. I wasn't sure; soy products are kind of hit or miss. Soy milk and bacon are delicious, whereas soy cheese is like eating orange Play-Doh. I once tried a product called "I Can't Believe It's Not Chicken!" and found myself completely able to believe it. But we decided to try making vegetarian sausage balls:

1 lb. grated sharp cheddar cheese

1 lb. not sausage

3 C Bisquick

Mix ingredients, roll into 1 in. balls, and bake at 350 for about 20 minutes. Mine came out looking a little more biscuit-y than regular sausage balls--I might use less Bisquick next time--but they tasted exactly the same. And those tubes of real sausage are pretty gross, anyway. I had never made sausage balls myself before, mainly because I didn't want to touch the dead animal mush. I think I could even be completely vegetarian now, if they would just start making convincing soy shrimp.