For chkn I shredded and baked some oyster mushrooms and baked some home-made seitan in a convection oven until it was poofy and crispy, which added a lot of flavor to the seitan (which I normally don’t love because it has that distinct flavor that is hard to mask).
Yeah, Spätzle is definitely not what I had in mind. The dumplings are rolled out with a rolling pin and shaped with a knife before being boiled, more like a hand-made lasagna noodle or something (but smaller, and irregularly shaped, and thicker). Spätzle dough could work, though, for this purpose. I could probably just use my normal dumpling dough, just thicken with a bit more flour and leave out the leavening agents.