Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Dinner and Cleaning As I Go



Okay.  Dinner was not as pretty as I had hoped.  But it actually tasted pretty amazing.  I mostly followed the recipe on Fat Free Vegan.  I really love all the recipes I've tried from this site.  They are all pretty simple and EASY to follow.  Obviously my stuffed seitan didn't turn out quite like Susan's did, but I'm sure the taste was pretty close. 

I did my filling a little different than the recipe, simply because I HATE celery.  Will.  Not.  Eat it.  My mom tried everything she could think of, when I was a kid, to get me to like it.  No luck.  I love carrots instead :)  Anyway.  I used double the amount of mushrooms and no celery.  I also added 2 small jalapenos, because I like a little spicy.

In case you all didn't know, you do not need to use oil to saute your veggies!  Just pop your veggies in your pan, as if you were going to saute or stir fry with oil, and let them get all yummy smelling and soft, stirring occasionally.  Then add about 1/4 cup water or veggie broth to get up any of the brown, cooked on bits.  There you go.  No oil saute. 

I was just about to toss this thing the other day, since I don't eat eggs anymore.  Now I'm glad I didn't!  I used it to cut my mushrooms, just the way I used to cut my eggs!  It made quick work of an otherwise time consuming task.  I sliced all of my 8 oz of mushrooms this way and it took may 7 minutes.  That includes the time I paused to take a couple pictures.  One draw back - As you can tell from my counters, this isn't the "cleanest" way to slice mushrooms.  I had little mushroom bits all over the place after this.  Not to fear, I got them all cleaned up :)

So, I mixed up the veggies to saute, then worked on the seitan.  Now, this seitan recipe has a few.... "different" ingredients that you don't find in just every seitan recipe.  Not that it's a bad recipe - it's actually delicious!  I was just a little surprised to see ground flax seed and oat meal on my ingredient list :P

I am pretty sure I made mine just a little too wet.  It was not holding shape well, and I should have stopped and added some more dry stuff, but I didn't want to stop.  So, I rolled it out, spread my filling on it, and rolled it up.  That's when the first sign of trouble came up.  But I was not to be deterred!  I pressed on, with my floppy seitan and overly mushroomy filling.  As I plopped the ever-shifting mass into my pan, I was almost lead to throw the whole thing away:





It was coming apart all over the place.  I was a little depressed :(  But!  I had come this far, so I said, "What the hell, let's finish this thing."  So I did.  And I'm glad I did.  But I wasn't glad until I tasted the thing.  At this point in the process, I was still a little depressed.  I added the roasting liquid, and it came apart even more.  But, I was determined.  So I wrapped it up like a present and popped it in the oven.

After baking and basting and baking and basting and baking again, I had a pretty decent smelling kitchen.  It didn't look too hot though :(

I started kind of cleaning after I got my "roulade" in the oven.  I was surprised at how quickly it came around.  Mine you, I'm not one that "likes" to clean, I just like my house to be clean.  I swear, I would love little brownies to come clean the place while I was asleep.  Alas, I don't live in fairy tale land.... *sigh*  So, I set about cleaning it up all by myself. 



I'm not sure if I've mentioned, but I clean better when Hubby's home.  We split the duties, each taking what we're good at - me vacuum, Hubby dishes - and at the end, we have a clean apartment.  So just imagine my sense of sinking when I stepped back from cooking and saw this kitchen.  Bleh.  It looks worse than what it really is because my stoneware lives in my oven, so I had to take it out to make dinner.  Once I took that into account, it was a little better.  Then I realized there are clean dishes ready to be put up, so I did that.  Then everything went nicely into the dishwasher, ready to be cleaned, once we have a full load.  :)  Easy clean up! 

So, dinner was great.  Had "roulade" (I keep putting quotes around it, since it didn't really roll up) and fiesta corn. 

I finished my evening with a lovely Earl Gray/lavender tea that I got from a friend at work.  If you should find yourself in possession of such a tea, I suggest you only steep it for about 3 minutes.  The longer it steeps, the soapier the lavender flavor gets.  But when you get the time just right, it's amazing :)

Good night!  Hope to see you all again soon!  :)

No comments:

Post a Comment