Seitan, boiled
There are lots of ways to make seitan. First of all, you can make it from scratch (starting with just flour and water), or you can take a short cut and start with gluten flour. I almost always do the latter. Next, you have to decide what else (other than gluten and water) you want to put in your dough. The options are endless. Common additions are soy sauce, nutritional yeast, garlic, chickpea flower, paprika… Third, you have to decide how to cook your seitan. You can boil it, steam it (another try), braise it, saute it, or bake it. For each method you have to decide what kind of broth or sauce to cook it in (if any). Finally, you have to decide what to do with the final product. Learning how to make seitan is a long and complicated journey, and I am just at the very beginning. Today’s post is about my most recent attempt to make boiled seitan. Read the rest of this entry »
Balsamic-roasted seitan over garlic mashed potatoes and parsnips
I asked Derek to choose something to make for dinner, and he picked this menu out of the winter section of Peter Berley’s Fresh Food Fast. It was a big undertaking! The menus in this book usually take under an hour, but I had to first make my own seitan. Even after the seitan was made, this menu took longer than an hour, mostly because peeling the shallots took forever. Luckily Derek liked the dish a lot, and I enjoyed it as well, so all that effort wasn’t wasted. Read the rest of this entry »
Lebanese lentils and rice with blackened onions
I remember going to a Lebanese restaurant in a basement in Pittsburgh, and getting a very tasty (but very oily) dish of lentils and rice, covered in caramelized onions. This recipe from the AMA cookbook doesn’t say anything about its origins, but I imagine it’s based on the same traditional Lebanese recipe. Read the rest of this entry »
Light, fruited noodle kugel
When I was a kid my mom used to make my grandmother’s noodle kugel recipe on special occasions. It was a savory, not a sweet kugel, and I think it had about a pound each of butter, sour cream, cottage cheese, and eggs. It was tasty, but super rich. So when I saw a similar looking–but lighter–recipe in the AMA cookbook, I was curious to try it. Read the rest of this entry »
Savory adzuki beans
Adzuki beans (also called aduki beans) are the small red beans often used in sweet dishes in China, Korea, and Asia. They’re relatives of mung beans, urad dal (which is not actually a lentil), and black eyed peas. But adzukis (in my opinion) are cuter than all their close cousins. I don’t have many recipes that call for adzukis, perhaps partly because I can’t get them here in Germany. I brought some back with me from the U.S. last time I was there though, and decided to use the rest of them to try this savory, Asian-flavored adzuki bean recipe from Peter Berley’s Modern Vegetarian Kitchen.
The captious vegetarian 