My husband also doesn't like the texture of ground beef substitutes, no matter how well seasoned. However, he does like my tvp/meat blends.
I get tvp from bulk bins, in health food stores and some grocery stores. It comes in several forms, but I buy the granules (they look much like grape nuts cereal or light tan aquarium gravel).
I brown it with ground meat(s), such as chorizo, sausage, or ground beef, pork, chicken. The fattier the meat I brown it with, the more tvp I use, in order to reduce the fat per portion (because tvp is virtually fat-free).
Inexpensive ground beef, ground pork, chorizo and other sausages have a lot of flavor, but the fat content is often far too high to be diet-friendly. However, by mixing it with the tvp, I can get the flavor and cost savings of higher fat choices, and the lower fat content of leaner ground meats.
The meat/tvp is a good compromise for us. While I like tvp ok (either reconsituted or in Boca products), I also prefer the taste and texture of "real meat" (because of the real meat in it). And saving money per serving, is a nice perk also.
I have a basic recipe on my blog
http://3fatchicks.com/diet-blogs/kaplods/
It's not so much a recipe as a flexipe, because if you've ever browned and seasoned ground beef - you just do what you normally do, but ad the dry tvp and equal amounts by value of water to reconstitute. You can add the water to the tvp before, after, or during browning with the ground beef (or ground whatever).
I made a huge batch a week or two ago. I used 1 lb of ground pork, 1 lbs of ground beef, and about 1 lb of dry tvp (the equivalent of 4 lbs of ground beef) and seasoned with onion, bell pepper, celery, and diced carrot. Then I freeze, stirring every half hour or so so that it freezes in crumbles (or I freeze it in recipe sized containers).
Because tvp doesn't have a lot of flavor, but absorbs flavor very well, the more tvp you use, the more seasonings you will also use.
When I first started making tvp, I'd use 1/2 of a cup of dry tvp to 1 lb of ground beef. (the equivalent of 2 parts meat to 1 part tvp), and every time I made it I would use more and more tvp.
1 lb of meat and 1 cup of tvp is my "standby" recipe, but this last mega-batch turned out so well, I may make it my new standard.
The reason I make such a mega-batch, is because it doesn't take much more time to make, and then I can get multiple super-quick meals. In the long-run it saves me a lot of time in the kitchen.
I bought a few really cheap ground beef cookbooks at Goodwill and on amazon.com, and so many of the recipes start with ground beef.
