Tempeh Win

Tempeh would be one of the forms of soy that I can eat--it's fermente-licious! Whee!

I usually buy it once a month and have continued to struggle with it as a meat analogue. I swear, I go places like Beans and Barley and buy a tempeh sandwhich (usually a tempeh lettuce tomato) and marvel at the magic that happened and turned that slab of fermented soybeans into slices. Taste of the sandwich? Eh, who cares, it's a bland sammy that has a reasonable protein and no cheese. However, I am well aware that if I marinate the tempeh in some tasty sauce, I'll have a much nicer slab o' protein for home use.

Two problems: I can't get it to slice like a slice of meat (how the hell do they DO that? I never get anything but crumbles) and I've yet to try anyone's marinade recipe in a way that doesn't see me choking down something I hate in order to ensure I have nutrition and fuel.

So I ignored what everyone else in the world of vegan blogging does and did what I wanted to do.

I love BBQ sandwiches, and, really, if you have a BBQ sauce that you like, putting enough on will pretty much make anything you want to be BBQ flavored taste like nothing but sauce. So the worry wasn't if I could use the tempeh to make a decent BBQ sandwich, but whether or not the tempeh could succeed without being sauced to the point that I could have just dumped a can of meatless baked beans on some toast and been done.

I'm glad to report that it worked without the use of 2 cups of BBQ sauce to 1 cup of tempeh.


Tempeh BBQ

Chop one cup of onion, 2-5 cloves of garlic. Heat approximately 1/4 cup of olive oil in a pan and sautee the onions, garlic, and one tablespoon of hot giardiniera--do not drain the oil out of the giadiniera, it carries spices that will cut the sweet of the BBQ sauce. Crumble the tempeh and saute with the onions, garlic, and giardiniera. When it is sauteed to the point of your preference, add your favorite BBQ sauce. Start with 1/4 cup and add more sauce until the dish is at your favorite stage of sauce saturation. I prefer a slightly dry mix, but lots of people love the sauce dripping out of the sandwich as they bite into the goodness.

Here it is served on toasted whole wheat bread (second slice not pictured, but I assure you, it was a sammy) with an organic avocado, organic strawberries, and organic, steamed green beans with a drizzle of fig flavored balsamic vinegar.

The figgy vinegar was good, but I think I would like to try something a little more bold with it next time.

Without a doubt, I will make this again, perhaps with a smokier BBQ sauce. When choosing, I have to recall that this is going to taste nutty rather than beefy, and choose a BBQ sauce that can work with that.

Note: This is a third coast blog, and no matter where I live, I'm always a Chicago girl. All references to giardiniera should be understood to imply the popular Chicago-style condiment.

Tomato Win

I don't really have time to do a detailed write up of this dish, but I need to at least jot down some notes, that it may be enjoyed again.

This is what happened to the leftover seiten, the leftover brown rice from the veggie burgers, 4 huge organic heirloom tomatoes, 2 large carrots, 4 cloves of organic garlic, pan drippings from the seitan's cooking broth, olive oil, a heaping spoonful of Patak's ginger garlic, and plenty of water.

Michael said, "That was a great lunch you made, honey, I'd eat that anytime."

Which would be why I am here jotting down notes instead of just hoping that the picture will remind me of what I did when I made something--when I started this piscetarian adventure, I'd take a picture of something that I felt turned out well, certain that I'd remember what I did.

I look at those pictures now, more than a year later, and ... yeah ... no clue.

I'm already kind of not certain about the delicious clam-leek-tato stew I made the other day.

So to make sure that a dish Miguel-san specifically hinted he'd want again actually shows up on the table again, here's the fast action steps:

Take the pan out of the refrigerator (you know, I have this weird habit of putting the pan with the dripping right in the fridge--it's a waste to wash out that flavor if you can use it the next day. I know it sounds weird, but if the pan is covered and your fridge is working properly, it's not a problem) and let it start coming to room temperature. Cut up the carrots and garlic, and let them begin to come to room temperature--this reallt does not take long. Now, put the carrots, garlic, and a couple of cups of water into the pot. Cook the carrots to the al dente stage. Now, chop up the tomatoes and add them to the pot with a generous sploosh of olive oil and several sprigs of fresh thyme. Add as much water as is needed to cover the tomatoes and let cook until you can mash the veggies to bits. Mix in approximately 2 t to 1 T ginger/garlic paste. Add approximately 2 cups of cooked brown rice and approximately 2 cups of sliced, onion-soup-braised seitan. Add another generous sploosh, this time a sploosh of red wine. Again, add water as needed and then allow to reduce to the thickness of a thick jambalaya. Because one is using leftovers here, it is always best to make sure it cooks at a boil for at least 10 min after the final ingredient is added.

I have some for my lunch tomorrow. MMmmmMMMMmmmmm. There was enough salt in the drippings and seitan from the onion soup. If you don't have the drippings, substitute onion granules and salt & pepper to taste, or a spoonful of onion soup base. Marmite/Vegimite/Naggi sauce might also work, as would miso if you can have soy.

Seitan bake part two, or, Mock Beef y-Stywyd

I made a first try at seitan with a typical pre1601 European flavoring profile here. This entry is the follow up, describing how it was completed for consumption.

My initial thought was to make a savory pie, mostly because I love savory pies as a handy dandy meal. Mmmmm... Medieval pot pies.... But, of course, most medieval meat pies have fruits rather that vegetables in them--if there is something other than meat in there at all. While I am certain that I will eventually come up with a tasty pot pie substitute, the work I want to do for same is many layered, and I still have work to do on the other components before I start experimenting with the entire concept.

And so I thought about how I might make the seitan work as a tasty meat like substance on its own.

And I remembered Beef Y-Stewed.

I love modern beef stew, but the above mentioned recipe is really about cooking lesser cuts of beef in an excellent broth. We have served a similar dish at feasts in the past, cheap cuts of beef slowly stewed in red wine, spices, and apricot preserves, a delicious dish based on the redaction work of Michelle Santy/Amytis de Fontaine. However, I have never bothered to redact this myself - as much as I enjoy it, I have preferred ways to prepare inexpensive cuts which do not involve cooking with 1/2 bottles of red wine. Call it a quirk, but I prefer wine and beer as flavor enhancers rather than primary ingredient-I'd simply rather drink the wine. :-)

However, I also remembered the delicious beef prepared according to Amytis' method, and so it seemed to me a good way to explore the second cook session for the seitan. The results?


Mock Beef y-Stywyd at the 6 o'clock spot, with apples, walnuts, and peas.

Mmmm Mmmmm Good. This did not taste like Edouard Halidai's Beef y-Stywyd, of course, but it did not taste like unsweetened cinnamon bread, either. Instead, it tasted like a bit of meat that wasn't quite identifiable, very mild, made better with a long stew in a good broth. Not as powerful as real beef, but certainly acceptable and something I plan to do again and again. And, as an accidental bonus, it's a recipe that relies on bread, especially when considering how the recipe is described in late and just post period versions. You can look at this recipe and say, heck, the only thing we left out was the meat. We subbed big chunks o' super dense bread for the beef.

The period recipe for this:

Beef y-Stywyd. Take fayre beef of þe rybbys of þe fore quarterys, an smyte in fayre pecys, an wasche þe beef in-to a fayre potte; þan take þe water þat þe beef was soþin yn, an strayne it þorw a straynowr, an sethe þe same water and beef in a potte, an let hem boyle to-gederys; þan take canel, clowes, maces, graynys of parise, quibibes, and oynons y-mynced, perceli, an sawge, an caste þer-to, an let hem boyle to-gederys; an þan take a lof of brede, an stepe it with brothe an venegre, an þan draw it þorw a straynoure, and let it be stylle; an whan it is nere y-now, caste þe lycour þer-to, but nowt to moche, an þan let boyle onys, an cast safroun þer-to a quantyte; þan take salt an venegre, and cast þer-to, an loke þat it be poynaunt y-now, & serue forth. --from Two Fifteenth Century Cookery Books, and available with transliteration and redaction at Gode Cookery, here.

I did have to spend some time thinking about the base broth that I was going to use. In the end, I decided on a packet of Campbell's dried onion soup. Why?

1. It's the least objectionable of the commercially made, widely available dried onion broths. No soy, no beef. The only food sensitivity that needs to be watched is the dextrose and the yeast extract. You will have corn products in your food, but you're making fake beef. You can look past the trace corn here. There is a comparison of ingredients in commercial onion soup powders here, if you'd like to look for something else. In any event, it's a strong broth that will at least suggest the flavor of beef.

2. The recipe calls for onions--this is a reasonable broth to doctor up, because the source recipe calls for onions at an undetermined amount.

And so, choice made and path firmly before me.... I began.

First, I placed the sliced seitan in the slow cooker and lightly browned it in olive oil, mostly because I was afraid it would fall apart. It did not. I'd not skip that step, though, as there is little fat in the the seitan, and some small additional amount is needed to give this a satisfactory mouth feel. I added the onion soup, enough water to cover the seitan, and let it slow cook.

Given that the seitan had already been seasoned with a number of spices mentioned as part of the cooking broth in the receipt above, I elected not to add them to the broth.

The seitan and broth cooked until such time as I could smell that it was done. You'll know that point. Your kitchen will smell like tasty onion soup. This actually improved the texture of the seitan immensely--before the braising, it was a little too firm, a smidgen too dry, but upon completion, it was just fine. 

The broth was pretty significantly reduced by this time, and so I removed the seitan and added 1/4 c. red wine, 3 T apple cider vinegar, chopped fresh sage (about 8 leaves with the stem, likely 2 T when chopped) and a teaspoon of dried parsley. I put the seitan back in, let it simmer until the broth was reduced to a small amount of thick sauce (which did not take long, there was not much left after the braising) and served it as you see above.

I decided to serve it with peas and walnuts because I'm still a fan of the complete protein school of vegetarian meal planning, and an apple to get a fruit food group on the plate. 

Further exploration of period and slightly post period beef "stew" recipies are here: I may try to include some of these in the next go round.

A European Mock Meat. Of a Sort. Part 1.

No. I didn't suddenly discover that Western Europeans before 1601 regularly substituted fried turnip circles for meat or had managed to figure that bulgur is a marvy sub for finely chopped meat or made barley burgers for Lent (although those are all reasonable choices for dealing with the meat-free option when working with a free flowing minced meat recipe).

No, this is about making a solid chunk o' sumptin that can serve in place of a solid chunk o' meat. This is about veggie burgers from foods and spice choices appropriate to our period.

This is the first of several veggie burgers I'm making based on Joanna Vaught's recipe. These veggie burgers feature ingrediants known to Western Europeans, and so, while they can not be considered something anyone would have made, they can serve as something that is SCA compatible--a sure protein with the flavors of the age.



The primary veggie and protein in these burgers.
Why no picture of the actual burgers? Keep reading.

The recipe:

2 cups chopped, sauteed leeks
1.5 cups cooked black eyed peas
1.5 cups cooked brown rice
3/4 cups vital wheat gluten
1/4 cup olive oil
1/4 almond milk
2 tablespoons red wine
2 teaspoons ginger
1 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon grains of paradise
1/2 teaspoon salt

*I chose the spice mix based on a couple of recipes for leeks from Du fait de cuisine (France, 1420), specifically, "White Leeks" and "Sauce Piquant." This is an obvious choice, of course, as the predominant vegetable in this recipe are the leeks.

*The long term prep work doesn't need much attention--a slow cooker for the black eyed peas, a rice cooker for the rice. I like to think of it as handing the ingrediants to a couple of servants and letting them take care of the actual cooking. ;-) Drain the black eyed peas before use.

*In reviewing a mass of leek recipes for the creation of this particular SCA compatible protein, I frequently ran across the instruction to soak the leeks first. I last used leeks with a mock cheese sauce for a recipe I did not blog--the recipe was very good, but the thing was gritty. That was a shock to me, as I had never before run into that problem. Michael suggested that I soak the leeks next time, and since there were so many recipes that include this instruction, I'm going to emphasize this as a non-skippable step in period instruction. Chop the leeks and soak them. This will filter out the grit. I promise. Let them soak for 1/2 hour or so, then drain & sautee them in as much olive oil as is needed.

When you are ready to make the burgers, pre-heat your oven to 400F. If, like me, you use cast iron for cooking, place it into the oven to preheat, as well.

Mix the dry ingredients in one bowl. Mix the veggies, rice, beans in another, then mix the dry ingredieants into that. Now add the liquids and mix it up well to get the gluten activated. If you want, grab a masher and mash the whole mess up a bit. Note that warm beans and rice will get the gluten activating right off, so be prepared to work fast if you are using warm ingrediants.

Form them into patties and place them into the pans and let them bake. Flip them at least once during the baking process. The recipe I am building on suggests 20 minutes a side, but I found I needed much longer, and ended up flipping them every 20 minutes until they were done in accordance with my tastes.

I was initially disappointed in them, because while still warm from the oven, they tasted very strongly of the VWG. Which, as I have said, is not bad, but I didn't throw in all that other good stuff just so I could eat something that tasted like bread. However, after an overnight refrigeration, the VWG flavor disappeared and what I had was yummy, yummy veggie burgers that did not fall appart and which reheated nicely in the microwave. And that would be why there are no pictures--I didn't take a picture when I thought the recipe wasn't going to work in this particular format, and next day, ate them all up before I could get a picture of the leftovers.