Wheat Meat

Sometimes vegetarians confuse me. I’m not talking about having a position against eating animals. I can respect that. I’m not even talking about the folks who claim to be vegetarian, but eat fish. This just in: Fish aren’t plants, fungi, eggs or dairy products. They’re animals. Look it up. No, I’m talking about something I hadn’t really thought of until our friend Steve brought it up several years ago. If you’re morally or ethically opposed to eating animal flesh, or are grossed-out by it, what’s up with all the fake meat?

Textured vegetable protein (TVP), seitan, soy dogs (and I’ve recently seen soy-rizo, an imitation chorizo sausage), soy crumbles, tofurky, and soy bacon. (I even find turkey bacon to be extremely phony. For the love of all that is good and decent, please leave the bacon to the pigs!) I’ve left tofu and tempeh off this list, because they are traditional foods that did not evolve under the pretense of being meat. TVP and seitan, was less sure about. I’m not really familiar with TVP, except as a filler in things like sandwich fillings and veggie burgers. Until recently, I knew nothing about seitan, but I learned that I could make it myself, so I decided to investigate it further.

Seitan (I’ve also seen it referred to as wheat meat) is basically kneaded and cooked wheat gluten. It has a firm and chewy texture and mostly tastes of the flavorful liquid in which it is cooked. It is also easily flavored with marinades and other seasonings, so it can taste pretty much however the cook wants it to taste. It seems to have originated in Asia as part of the Buddhist vegetarian diet, and gained popularity in the West as part of the macrobiotic diet in the second half of the twentieth century.

Strangely, at least to me, seitan always seems to have been used as a meat-like meat substitute for people who did not want to eat meat. Apparently, the fake meat trend has always been there. I don’t know why folks throughout history have not just eaten beans and grains, but have sought ways to turn them into foods that resemble meat. Perhaps the hunter-gatherer diet has become so rooted in our brains that we need to pull a fast one on ourselves to enjoy our meals.

Well, when I’m the one who does the cooking, I know pretty well that I didn’t put meat in a dish, no matter what it tastes or looks like. I wasn’t going to be faking myself out by making seitan, but I was curious about how it would go and whether it would taste good enough to make the effort worthwhile.

As it turned out, there really wasn’t that much effort involved in making seitan, or even that much mess. Some preparation methods that I have seen start with whole wheat flour, seem to take a long time, and involve washing away the bran and starch of the wheat to leave just the gluten. In How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman, however, seitan is made starting with wheat gluten. Since gluten flour (or vital gluten) is easy enough to find, I was perfectly happy to let someone else wash away the starch and bran.

I kneaded the gluten with water into a very rubbery mass, which took just a couple of minutes. I then shaped it into logs and simmered it in a mixture of vegetable broth (you could use water) and soy sauce for about an hour. The result was a sort of rubbery dumpling (say that three times fast). It is quite chewy, but more like extra-firm tofu or, well okay, meat, than like silly putty.

I have to say I liked my homemade seitan, and found the process fun, easy and affordable. I’m not sure that as a food it has any hope of converting a serious carnivore into a vegetarian, but that’s not what I’m setting out to do. Sure, I used it (in a stir fry that I hope to post next) where I might have used sliced chicken, beef or pork, but I try to think of it as an independent food with its own value as a protein source.

Who am I kidding? This stuff is fake meat. I feel a little like I’ve been defeated, but at least there was some good food at the end of the game.

Homemade Seitan
Adapted from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman

If you do not have a heavy-duty mixer (such as a Kitchen-Aid), you could mix and knead the seitan by hand, but it will take longer.

1 cup gluten flour (vital wheat gluten)
¾ cup water
6 cups vegetable broth (or water)
1/3 cup soy sauce

1. In the bowl of a heavy duty electric mixer, combine the gluten and ¾ cup water. Mix with the paddle attachment until completely combined. If all of the gluten flour does not incorporate, add water, just a few drops at a time until all of the gluten is mixed in.

2. Replace the paddle attachment with the dough hook, knead for about one minute or until the mixture forms a tight, very stretchy ball. Cover the dough and let it rest for 20 minutes.

3. While the dough rests, combine the vegetable broth and soy sauce in a large pot. Set aside.

4. Cut or pull the dough into two equal portions. Stretch and pull each section into a log or loaf shape. Submerge each loaf into the vegetable broth mixture. The liquid does not need to completely cover the loaves.

5. Bring to a boil, reduce the heat so that the liquid is just boiling gently or simmering. Cover and cook for about 1 hour, turning the loaves occasionally. The loaves will puff up considerably while they cook. You can cut off a sample of a loaf and taste it to see if it is done. If you wish for a less dense final product, cook it up to 30 minutes longer.


6. Cool the seitan in the cooking liquid and use right away, keep it in the refrigerator stored in the cooking liquid for several days, or freeze for several months.

Makes about 1 pound.

One year ago: Grilled Potatoes with Lime-Herb Dipping Sauce

Seasonal Stems

Since I began our subscriptions to this CSA, with its regular season and winter share post season, I’ve come to think of January through April as the “off season.” I’ve been eating what’s in the freezer, a few green things imported from the Emerald City, and a few of the fruits in the markets that manage to achieve something at least a little bit fruity. Now, however, is when things start getting exciting. More locally grown stalks and leaves, such as asparagus and spring salad greens and spinach, are available and the drab dinner table is perking up again.

Still, however, it will be a month or so before sweet and juicy home-grown fruits start sneaking into the shops and farm stands and markets. Unless I just ignore botanical conventions and call rhubarb a fruit. Some of those locally-grown pale green and red stems are available now, and I’m going to treat them like a fruit anyway, so I don’t have a problem using incorrect plant part classification. Especially when rhubarb is so yummy!



I tend to get myself into trouble when buying rhubarb. Not wanting to miss the season, I buy it when I can. Then, a perusal of my recipe stash reveals some great-looking desserts that will require another trip to the store and often other ingredients that just aren’t in season yet around here, like berries. (I realize I could easily get berries grown in other places, and often do, but they’re not always so great, and I want to make sure what I make with the rhubarb is going to have a chance to be pretty darn good.) I decided, for my first rhubarb dish of the 2010 season, to go with something relatively simple, made with rhubarb and pantry staples: muffins.

There seem to be a couple schools of thought in the muffin world. In some recipes, softened butter and sugar are creamed together like they would be for cookies or a cake. In the others, melted butter or oil is combined with the other wet ingredients. I tend to use the latter method for two very simple reasons: #1 That’s the way they do it in my favorite muffin cookbook, The Ultimate Muffin Book by Bruce Weinstein and Mark Scarbrough and #2 When I decide to make muffins, I rarely have thought to take some butter out of the refrigerator to soften it. It’s quicker and easier to just throw the cold butter in a pan and melt it.

I switched out some of the all purpose flour in this recipe for whole wheat pastry flour, bumping up the WFQ*. The sour cream in the batter keeps the muffin soft and moist, but still not quite encroaching on the cake category. There’s lots of brown sugar to balance the sour cream and sweeten up the super-sour rhubarb, but when you bite into a piece of the softened baked rhubarb, it’s still pleasantly tart, with that sort of floral-berry flavor that makes rhubarb so unique. I think the rhubarb aroma was even more available when the muffins were still a little warm.


Since I bought roughly four times as much rhubarb as I needed to make these muffins, I hope to try some more recipes with it soon. Or maybe, since they’re so simple to make and delicious to eat, I’ll just whip up three more batches of these muffins!

Rhubarb Sour Cream Muffins
Adapted from Martha Stewart Every Day Food magazine

I used 2% milk and reduced fat sour cream in this recipe, which seemed to work just fine.

The raw sugar on top of the muffins is optional, but it does make a nice, sweet, crunchy crust.

1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 packed cup light brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cinnamon
8 ounces rhubarb, cut into ½-inch chunks (about 2 cups)
1 large egg
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled
½ cup sour cream
½ cup milk
about 2 tablespoons turbinado sugar (raw sugar), optional

1. Preheat oven to 375 F. Coat the cups of a standard (12-cup) muffin pan with cooking spray, oil or butter (I use cooking spray). You could also line the cups with paper cupcake liners. Set aside.

2. In a large bowl, combine the all purpose flour, whole wheat pastry flour, brown sugar, baking powder, baking soda, salt and cinnamon. Whisk together to combine. Add the rhubarb and toss to coat with the flour mixture.

3. In a medium bowl, beat the egg lightly with a whisk. Add the melted butter and whisk together. Whisk in the sour cream and the milk.

4. Make an indentation in the center of the flour mixture. Pour in the egg mixture and stir until just moistened. You don’t want any large dry patches, but you also don’t want a very smooth batter. The batter will be quite thick.

5. Spoon the batter evenly into the prepared muffin cups. Each cup should be filled almost to the rim. Sprinkle each cupful of batter with turbinado sugar if desired.


6. Bake at 375 F about 25 minutes, or until a wooden pick inserted into the center of a muffin comes out free of wet batter. Cool in the pan 5-10 minutes. Carefully remove from the pan and cool on wire racks.

Makes 12 muffins.

Other recipes like this one: Rhubarb Yogurt Cake

*WFQ: Whole Food Quotient

Seasonal Leaves

Spring has come to Southeastern Minnesota. That’s a dangerous statement to make, since there’s always a chance that as soon as you do, you’ll find yourself with several inches of snow on your head. But the trees are in full leaf and the lilacs are in full bloom (and scent…aaaahhhh), so I’m going to go out on a limb and declare that spring is here.

That limb became even less precarious when I found these beautiful, beautiful locally grown greens at the local co-op. These were so pretty, I wanted to plunge my arms in them up to the elbows. I wanted to run my fingers through them right there in the store. I managed to restrain myself. In fact, the first time I saw them, I didn’t even buy them. I just didn’t have a plan for them, and I was terrified that they would just sit in the refrigerator while I tried to figure out something nice to do with them. They would go bad, which would amount to a mortal sin on my part and give me terrible nightmares.

The bad dreams were averted when a recipe caused itself to surface while I was attempting to organize part of my stash. It was in The Splendid Table e-mail newsletter by Lynne Rossetto Kasper, and since it is a fairly simple pasta toss, it was pretty straightforward to adapt it for slightly more seasonal and convenient ingredients. It contains shrimp and chickpeas along with the greens and, while I just swapped out bell peppers, which aren’t so great in the stores right now, with sun-dried tomatoes, you could also use cooked chicken or more chickpeas instead of the shrimp


The next time I went shopping, I bought those greens, just enough to use up in this recipe. (I waited to get home before running my hands through them.) They’re so young and tender and delicate, I almost felt guilty eating them. Almost. Some of them were peppery, some were earthy, some kind of sweet, some kind of bitter. All of them were great, just wilted a little bit in this pasta dish. Their earthiness went well with the shrimp and they all held up just enough against the more assertive flavors of the olives, sun-dried tomatoes and pepperoncini peppers.

I felt like there was really a lot of noodle to this dish when I made it with 8 ounces of dried pasta, and would have liked a greater ratio of the other, more flavorful stuff. The range of 6-8 ounces that I put in the recipe below reflects that opinion. If you like lots of pasta, eat lots of pasta. Next time I make it, I’ll put in less, and perhaps even more of those lovely spring leaves.

Pasta with Chickpeas, Shrimp and Spring Greens
Adapted from recipes by Lynne Rossetto Kasper

I don’t specify what size shrimp to buy, because I think you should get the best that you can no matter what size they are. Living in a shrimp-less part of the world has made me less picky about such things. Just cut them to the size you want them.

6-8 ounces uncooked twisty or curly short-cut pasta (I used cellentani, aka cavatappi)
2 tablespoons olive oil (preferably extra-virgin)
½ cup finely chopped red onion
1 cup cooked or canned chickpeas, rinsed and drained
½ pound shrimp, peeled and deveined, coarsely chopped
½ teaspoon coarse (kosher) salt, divided
2 large garlic cloves, finely chopped
¼ cup pitted and chopped kalamata olives
¼ cup sun-dried tomatoes, cut into thin strips
3-4 pickled pepperoncini peppers, sliced into rings
2 large handfuls young mixed salad greens
finely chopped parsley for garnish, optional

1. In a large pot, cook the pasta in boiling salted water until al dente (cooked through but still firm). Reserve ¼ cup of the pasta cooking water. Drain the pasta and set aside. Rinse the pot and return to the stove.

2. Heat the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onion and ¼ teaspoon salt. Saute 3-5 minutes or until beginning to brown. Add the chickpeas and shrimp. Saute about 3 minutes or just until the shrimp turns pink.

3. Stir in the garlic, olives, sun-dried tomatoes, and pepperoncini and cook about 1 minute. Add the pasta, greens, remaining ¼ teaspoon salt and reserved pasta water. Toss to combine and cook until the greens wilt. Taste for salt and add more if desired.

Makes about 4 servings.

Other recipes like this one: Pasta with Kale, Summer Squash, Olives and Feta Cheese

One year ago: Pasta with Spinach Ricotta Filling and Simple Tomato Garlic Sauce

All to Myself

If I want to have something tasty form my kitchen all to myself, I just have to put coconut in it. Around here, stirring the flaky white stuff is equivalent to the childish action of spitting on food to claim it as your own. With a few exceptions (known as safety coconut) Harry won’t eat it, and that’s that.

And so, when there was part of a can of coconut milk left over from making Pasta with Cauliflower and Cashew Sauce (a safety coconut recipe), I jumped at the opportunity to combine it with some of the secret stash of sweetened flaked coconut I keep in the freezer and make something I wouldn’t have to share. I had a relatively calorie-light muffin recipe with coconut milk and dried cranberries that I had fattened up by adding flaked coconut. I thought I’d try it with frozen cranberries in place of the dried, since I had two packages in the freezer from last fall. I also decided to test the connection between muffins and quick bread loaves by baking the batter in a loaf pan instead of individual muffin cups.

It all worked well and deliciously. The juicy tartness of the cranberries contrasts nicely with the sweet and chewy coconut flakes that fill every bite and the soft, almost cake-like crumb, which is fragrant with coconut milk. The slices are a bit delicate, at least more delicate than a muffin, but I don’t care. No one’s going to see me eat them alongside a nice cup of cocoa (with perhaps a dash of adult beverage for medicinal purposes) on an evening that I have all to myself.

Coconut Cranberry Quick Bread
Adapted from Cooking Light January/February 2005

2 cups all purpose flour
2/3 cup sugar
2 tsp baking powder
¼ tsp salt
1 large egg, lightly beaten
¼ cup butter, melted and cooled
1 cup light coconut milk
1 tsp grated lemon rind
½ tsp vanilla extract
1 cup coarsely chopped fresh or frozen cranberries (do not thaw if frozen)
1 cup coconut

1. Preheat oven to 400 F. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a medium bowl. Stir with a whisk until well combined.

2. In a medium bowl, lightly beat the egg with a whisk. Whisk in the melted butter, then add the coconut milk, lemon zest and vanilla and whisk until well combined

3. Make an indentation in the center of the flour mixture. Pour in the egg mixture and stir until just moist. Gently stir in the cranberries and coconut.

3. Oil an 8-inch bread pan or spray it well with cooking spray. Spoon the batter into the prepared pan.

4. Bake at 400 F for 55 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted into the center comes out without any wet batter clinging to it. Remove bread from the pan and place on a wire rack to cool. The bread may stick where cranberries have oozed out and baked to the side. Run a knife along these areas before attempting to remove the bread from the pan.


Makes 1 8-inch loaf

Recipes like this one: Zucchini Buttermilk Bread with Pecans, Pumpkin Oatmeal Quick Bread with Dates and Pecans

One year ago: Apricot Almond Cookies with White Chocolate