Braised seitan with Brussels, kale, and sun-dried tomatoes

What can you make with a fridge full of seitan, Brussels sprouts, kale, and sun-dried tomatoes? Yes, you guessed it! This is from the Veganomicon, and was surprisingly more delicious than the sum of its parts. Kale with Brussels sprouts? Another combination my conventional mind could never have dreamed up, but it works. The slight bitterness of both greens goes beautifully with the tart-sweet sundried tomatoes and chewy seitan. I added some red pepper flakes but otherwise didn't change the recipe. It didn't really need the pepper flakes. I just like them.

Served over mashed potatoes with rutabaga left over from the other night, which was perfect.

I found the recipe here, so you need look no further if you wish to make this quick, surprisingly elegant one-pot meal for yourself and haven't yet acquired a Veganomicon of your own:

Braised seitan with Brussels, kale, and sun-dried tomatoes
Serves 4

2 tbsp olive oil
6 shallots, thinly sliced
2 cups seitan, sliced into bite-sized pieces
1/2 lb Brussels sprouts, quartered (about 2 cups)
4 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 tsp dried thyme
1/2 tsp dried basil
1/4 tsp dried tarragon
1/2 tsp salt
fresh ground black pepper
1/2 cup sun-dried tomato, rinsed and chopped
2 cups vegetable broth
1/4 cup red wine
4 cups kale, chopped

Preheat a large pan over medium-high heat. Sauté the shallots and seitan in 2 tbsp olive oil for about 7 minutes, until they have both browned. Add the Brussels sprouts and sauté for 3 more minutes, adding a little extra olive oil if need be. Add the garlic, herbs, salt, and pepper, and sauté for another minute. Mix in the sun-dried tomatoes.

Add the vegetable broth and wine. Once the liquid is boiling, add the chopped kale. Stir the kale until it is wilted. Cover the pan, leaving a little room for steam to escape, and lower the heat. Simmer for 5-7 minutes. Taste and adjust the salt, and serve immediately.

Curried yellow split-pea soup with squash and raisins

Courtesy of Lorna Sass and her Complete Vegetarian Kitchen. I made the red lentil variation, and spiced it up a bit with red pepper flakes and a little lemon juice. Unfortunately, I couldn't find the recipe online to share, but it is basically onions, butternut squash, red lentils, and raisins cooked with mild Indian spices. The raisins are really a nice touch. You add them right at the beginning with the water so by the end of the cooking time they're just soft pillows of sweetness.

This is one of those cookbooks I photocopied most of in the library, years ago, when it was called Notes from an Ecological Kitchen. Now I've finally purchased it, and am looking forward to trying the recipes on the pages I didn't have before. Lorna Sass, if you're not already aware of this, is a pressure cooker authority (she states in her introduction that "Almost all of the recipes in this book…can be prepared in a pressure cooker or a wok, two cooking methods that offer optimum time and fuel efficiency") whose wisdom in this regard I can only partially profit from since my pressure cooker is a big old jiggle top—too big for my usual daily needs. I hear they have these little stationary regulator pressure cookers available now, though…

Mashed potatoes and rutabagas

This is something I have never tried before. But why not? It's so good! I recently came into possession of two large-ish rutabagas, and rather than just chuck them into stews—delicious as that is—I want to try some new (at least to me) ways of cooking them.

There are numerous recipes all over the Internet for this dish, but what I ended up doing was really simple. I took half a rutabaga and chopped it up and boiled it in a little salted water for ten minutes, then added four medium sized peeled, chopped potatoes (roughly twice the volume of the half-rutabaga) and half a chopped white onion and continued to cook all this until everything was tender. Then I ran it all through the potato ricer, added a few tablespoons of Earth Balance, and that's it. The rutabagas kind of meld into the potatoes without, as you might expect, overpowering them flavour-wise, and add a delicious smooth, sweet, buttery taste.

In the same water as I had boiled these, I then cooked a few of the surprisingly excellent green beans I found in the grocery store this morning (Sunday morning, at Superstore? I felt like I had slipped into some kind of alternate heavenly dimension of Superstore that ordinary mortals never see), and then saved the fragrant cooking water for stock—actually, it pretty much was stock by then.

So these are served with a big thick slice of baked butternut squash on beet-merlot reduction (from the freezer), and some meatballs made from Bryanna Clark Grogan's recipe for Hot Italian Seitan Sausage from Nonna's Italian Kitchen. The dollop of white on the butternut squash is some of the tofu yogurt left over from yesterday. It had had a chance to chill and was really fresh and rich and creamy. Not yogurt, but definitely yogurt-y, and it certainly didn't taste like tofu. I'm not sure how you managed that, Bryanna, but it's genius, and excellent with the meatballs especially.

Butter chicken

For the curious, my mother had total shoulder replacement surgery at the end of January, so I've been at the hospital, or at her place, or rushing here and there not really cooking, and with little time to blog. Having the use only of one arm (for six weeks in her case) is a handicap in all sorts of ways that only really hit home when you're absolutely faced with them (how to do your hair, fold clothes, have a shower, cut your food, open the jewel case of a DVD for heaven's sake). Anyway, all's well, and I'm back, with a recipe to make up for my absence.

Here's another dish I never tasted as an omni, though people of so many different culinary likes rave about it that I thought I'd have a go at veganizing it. Having done that, my advice to my future self would be to relax: it's good, but not magical, also easier than I imagined it would be. I thought Soy Curls would work well in this recipe, and they do, but you would also have good success with tofu or chickpeas, and if you used chickpeas you could skip the whole marinade process and just go straight to the sauce and I bet it would be just as good, and certainly less fattening.

Here are a few helpful links: a video, on a site called Wicked How-To's which has the added bonus of instructions on such useful projects as How to Make a Glowing Ball of Deadly Plasma in Your Microwave and How to Make a Hot Outfit out of an Old Shirt; plus the recipe I adapted mine from.

My version is fairly fiery, which is how I like things, but you'll want to use your own judgment on the amount of chili you put into yours.

Butter chicken (Murgh Makhani)
Serves 2

Marinade
1 cup dry Soy Curls, reconstituted in warm water for approximately 20 minutes
1 tbsp soy yogurt (I used Bryanna's tofu yogurt)
2 tsp lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon red chili powder
1/2 small onion, chopped
1 tsp ginger, chopped
1 tsp garlic, chopped
1/4 tsp salt, or to taste
1/4 tsp sugar

Sauce
3/4 cup diced canned tomatoes
2 tbsp Earth Balance
1 teaspoon ground coriander
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 tsp red chili powder
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/4 tsp garam masala
1/2 tsp brown sugar
1 tsp chopped ginger
1 tsp minced green chilies
1 tbsp cashew or almond butter
1 tbsp tofu yogurt
salt, to taste

Garnish – all or any of:
1 tbsp Earth Balance
more tofu yogurt
finely chopped cilantro


In a blender, puree all the ingredients for the marinade into a paste. Drain the Soy Curls and squeeze out the excess water. Stir the marinade into the drained, squeezed Soy Curls in a bowl and let the mixture sit for up to a couple of hours.


When you're ready to cook:

Heat 1 tbsp Earth Balance on medium heat in a heavy-bottomed pan and put in the Soy Curls along with the marinade. Stir fry for about 20 minutes or so until the Soy Curls have dried out a bit and are beginning to turn golden. Set aside.


Now make the sauce:

Heat the remaining 1 tbsp Earth Balance in a saucepan and add the red chili powder, coriander, cumin, black pepper, garam masala, and ginger, and fry for a few seconds. Add the chopped tomatoes, sugar, and salt and cook uncovered on medium for about 7 minutes until the puree thickens. Using an immersion blender or a regular blender, puree this mixture into a fairly smooth paste. Pour it back into the saucepan, stir in the tofu yogurt and the cashew or almond butter, reduce the heat to low, and cook for a few more minutes.

Add the Soy Curls and green chilies to the simmering sauce and taste for salt. Cover and simmer on low heat for about 5 minutes more or till the curry is heated through.

Just before serving pour more melted EB over the curry (if you can handle it; I admit, I couldn't). Garnish with a swirl of tofu yogurt and/or finely chopped cilantro.

Served here with koki, a whole wheat roti with hot fresh green chilis and chopped onions mixed in, as well as lightly stir fried broccoli with Indian spices.

This is a portrait of my cat Cheeta commissioned by me from my talented, temporarily one-armed artist mother...and yes, it's her left arm in the sling, so she can still paint!

Finally, if you've read this far, Andrea over at Andrea's Easy Vegan Cooking has tagged me with what used to be called a meme (as she points out) and is now called an award. Well, cool, thanks, Andrea! The idea of the Honest Scrap Award is for the tagged blogger to say 10 honest things about him/herself, and then to tag 7 other bloggers in turn.

So if anyone's interested, here are 10 random, though true, things about me, in no particular order:

1. I don't own a car, television set, or cell phone, but am an iTunes ho—movies, TV, music, and especially, these days, iTunes U.

2. Although I've been vegan for more than ten years I've never tried tempeh. I recently bought a packet and it is in my refrigerator, and I'm scared of it.

3. My MBTI type is INTP. It's a rare type; there are proportionately about as many of us in the general population as schizophrenics or sociopaths, though my impression is that the ratio may be higher in the blogosphere.

4. My favourite type of book—and since I read constantly and love reading even more than cooking I mean the true home of my heart—is academic essays written between about 1860 and 1960. Right now I'm reading F. M. Cornford and W. K. C. Guthrie on the Presocratics.

5. I haven't had a cold for six or seven years. I credit this of course to my extremely healthy diet.

6. I take a Vitamin B-100 stress tab twice a day and it gives me a little high. Or maybe that's just how normal people without B-absorption issues feel all the time.

7. I know the first 250 lines of Paradise Lost by heart.

8. I'm a ferocious grocery store snob, and pronounce harsh judgments in my mind on other people's Twinkies and pre-fab food.

9. My cat Cheeta is named after a literary character. No one has ever guessed which book; they all just figure I can't spell. If you know, leave a comment and I'll tag you with this meme because we'll have something really amazingly wonderful in common and I'll want to know more about you.

10. I'm shy. Too shy to dare pass this on, so I haven't given myself the little award icon, but I had fun reading Andrea's 10 things and some of the others on the Internet and thought I'd play half the game anyway…

Teriyaki-glazed tofu with cracked wheat pilaf with tomato and cinnamon

The tofu is the teriyaki-glazed tempeh from Vegan Planet (only with tofu; here's the recipe on Google Books, page 345), and the pilaf is from Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. Served with baby bok choy stir fried with garlic, ginger, and red pepper flakes, a little cucumber-sour cream salad, and fried enoki mushrooms. A fancy meal with lots of dishes, but not as involved to make as it might look, and relaxing timing-wise except for the bok choy right at the end.

I keep buying enoki mushrooms and never really know what to do with them, since they tend to vanish in stir fries and soups, but this is a nice way to cook them, just take a piece, clean it, spread it out gently on a hot oiled skillet, sprinkle with sea salt, let cook until the bottom begins to brown, and flip.

The pilaf is delicious; I've made it many times, and leftovers can be turned into a nice substantial Middle-Eastern-type soup with the addition of some stock, potatoes, garbanzo beans, and a few extra vegetables, maybe with a little tahini drizzled over each serving.

Orange and thyme-scented white bean and 'sausage' chili

...from Vegan Planet. I actually cooked this a few days ago, but my photographs were spoiled owing to the fact that I was so hungry I couldn't wait for it to stop steaming. What decided me to try it was really only that I've been craving citrus and had the other ingredients on hand and not a whole lot of time, but am I ever glad I did. And it was even better after a day or two in the fridge. The recipe calls for orange juice, orange zest, and an optional 2 tablespoons of orange liqueur, so it is very orange-y. Which you might imagine wouldn't mesh well with spicy soy sausage and chili powder…but if you imagined that you would be wrong. It's a mesh made in Heaven.

And the recipe is over on Google Books (page 325). So go try it for yourself!

I first spooned the chili over jasmine rice as suggested, but then last night baked it in a casserole with some of the drop biscuits from Veganomicon, and they were awesome too, light and moist and perfect.

This was served with a little salad of grated carrot, orange slices, a bit of olive oil, lime juice, salt and pepper, topped with minced radish. Mmmmm, orange….

Seitan stroganoff

You can probably detect a certain seitanic theme in recent posts—this is partly because I've just made another big batch of chicken-style seitan and am experimenting with different ways to cook with it, and partly because it's just so darn good. This is a seitan stroganoff I made based on some mushroom gravy left over from a meal at my parents', and with one eye also on Robin Robertson's Wheat-meat stroganoff recipe from Vegan Planet. So…mushroom gravy, with a little additional water mixed with tomato paste, paprika, and some tofu sour cream (whipped up from Vegan Planet's recipe), all proportions to taste, over browned chipped seitan and stir-fried onions and green peppers, all served over wide noodles mixed with a little Earth Balance and poppyseeds.

Tasty, easy, and satisfying. There's just something so right about transforming leftovers into something great that is at the same time utterly different from their previous incarnations!