recipe: stuffed mushrooms using gimme lean (fake) sausage

my original recipe is from the food network... tyler florence's stuffed mushrooms with sausage.  here are the changes i made to his recipe: 

• 1/4 cup raisins
• 8 large Spanish green olives, pitted
• 1/4 cup pine nuts raw cashews
• 2 handfuls fresh flat-leaf parsley 3/4 Tbs dried parsley
• 1/2 tsp sage (the gimme lean needs some extra parsley)
• 2 garlic cloves 1 tsp garlic paste
• 1 pound Italian sausage, removed from casing 1 tube gimme lean ground sausage
• 3/4 cup freshly grated pecorino parmasean cheese (i don't even know what pecorino is!)
• Extra-virgin olive oil
• Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
• Pinch red pepper flakes
• 1 cup fresh (homemade) bread crumbs
• 24 large white  crimini mushrooms, stems removed

Preheat to 400 degrees.

I actually made only half the recipe, as I had only 10 mushrooms from before making soup.  Even with that, I think half the recipe would be enough to stuff 24 mushrooms.  I made "sausage balls" with the leftover stuffing and i had plenty for 24 mushrooms.  Just sayin' - half is plenty.

Chop the raisins, olives, and cashews; put into a mixing bowl along with parsley and garlic. Add the sausage and 1/2 cup of the cheese. Drizzle the stuffing with about  1 Tbs. of olive oil to moisten and season with salt, pepper, and red pepper flakes; combine with hands.  Notice how greasy your hands are NOT because it isn't sausage!  Gimme lean has NO FAT in it!

Put the bread crumbs in another bowl, drizzle with a bit of olive oil and add the remaining cheese and mix.

I made small balls (like the size you would make for oreo balls) round and then gently stuffed them into the mushroom, one at a time.  Then, I dipped the stuffing side into the breadcrumb mixture and then put it mushroom side down on a stone pan. As I said before, I made stuffing/sausage balls with the remaining mixture and also coated them with breadcrumbs. 

They cooked for about 20 minutes on 400degrees.  They started to brown at about 15 minutes and were a nice golden brown right at 20.  My oven, which typically doesn't cook even, actually did really well with these.  I did roll the "balls" half way along.

Anyway, these were great!  We ate these with our mushroom soup for dinner since there wasn't much left.  I'll definitely use the gimme lean sausage again - and this way too.  Just remembering to add sage for the patties when eating it alone.