Deep Thoughts by Robert Felty

One day recently I was trying to decide what to make for dinner. I was feeling a little sick, and was looking for comfort food. I thought I would make my Macaroni and cheese with spinach recipe, but we were out of flour. So instead I whipped up something new. I already had the frozen spinach thawing, so it would have to have spinach. We also still had a bunch of tomatoes from the garden (which had been ripening indoors). So I decided they would be good together. I also wanted it to be creamy, so I used the new trick I learned this summer of blending silken tofu with a little white miso and lime juice. Finally, I added some seitan (mock abalone) for a little more protein. The result was quite tasty.

Yesterday I tried another new dish, this one inspired by a recipe I found on the internet. It was for pork, but I subsituted mock pork (seitan). I had half a head of napa cabbage that needed to be used, and I found this recipe looking around for napa cabbage recipes. I thought that apricots and cabbage sounded like an interesting pairing, and that turned out to be the case. I made a few other substitutions. The original recipe called for curry powder, but I used garam masala; I also added some curry paste. I actually only had about 1/2 cup of apricots on hand. I think that it would have been better with more apricots. The dish was also very quick and easy, which is always a bonus.

• 1/2 head napa cabbage, shredded
• 1 cup dried apricots
• 1 Tbsp. garam masala
• 1 Tbsp. curry paste
• 2 tsp. dried rosemary
• 2 cans mock pork (seitan)

I boiled the apricots in some water in the microwave for a few minutes, then drained them and chopped them up. I sauteéd the cabbage in a little olive oil until it wilted, then added the apricots, spices and seitan. Once the seitan was hot, it was ready to serve, for a total of about 10 minutes of prep time, and 10 minutes cooking time.

Sunday I made a tasty stir fry with eggplant, bok choy, and mock chicken (seitan). It’s the first time I have tried eggplant in stir-fry. It turned out very nicely. First I cut the eggplant, then salted it, and let it sit for a few minutes (to remove bitterness). Then I fried up the eggplant in a little canola oil until soft (about 5-10 minutes). Then I added the seitan and the bok choy. Then I added a mixture of hoisin sauce, Sri Ri Cha hot sauce, rice vinegar, water, and a bit of cornstarch for the sauce, a bit of fresh green onion, and served it over brown rice.

Sometime this past summer I made an interesting discovery in the international aisle of the local Food-Coop, Bloomingfoods — Seitan in a can. What is seitan you might ask? It is wheat gluten. And what is wheat gluten? It is the part of wheat that makes bread stick together. Glutinous means sticky, and that is exactly what gluten does in bread. Without gluten, all the carbon dioxide that yeast produces when it is eating the sugars would simply evaporate, but the gluten in the wheat binds the flour together, and causes the air to get trapped, making little bubbles, which makes your bread light and fluffy. Other grains have gluten too, but wheat has the most by far.

If you get rid of the rest of the wheat and just leave the gluten, then you get a very sticky dough, which can be kneaded and cut into any shape you desire. Then the gluten is boiled, frequently in some sort of seasoned water, and then can be eaten, or can be further sauteéd, or baked. Seitan is 100% protein, and has a very nice texture which is surprising like meat. Lots of the commercially available meat substitutes contain seitan or wheat gluten, particularly in asian cooking (The Chinese invented it a long time ago). The only down side to seitan is that it is quite expensive. While living in Ann Arbor, I sometimes bought “Fajita strips” at the People’s Food Co-op, which were obviously made locally in someone’s kitchen, based on the ziploc bag and homemade label packaging. Boy were they tasty! Unfortunately, they cost about $5 for 12 oz. Needless to say, I was intrigued when I found seitan in a can for less than $2! Intrigued, but also skeptical. But as it turns out, it is very tasty. It can be a bit oily, so if you are making a stirfry, you might want to go light on the oil, or even drain the oil from the seitan to fry your vegetables. We have been able to find seitan in a can in a variety of flavors and shapes at the Co-op and at Asian grocery stores. Try it out!