rants & recipes

Last weekend, I made some of Evin's Pulled Pork Seitan with the intention of freezing half of it and smoking it this (long, holiday) weekend. Well, the weekend's here and I don't really feel like bothering with the smoker but we still had half of this seitan left - what to do with it?

I happened to remember, a few months back, looking for "seitan meatball" recipes online, and getting so frustrated because they all seemed to call for X ounces of seitan and, at the time, I wanted recipes that started with wheat gluten ... but, today, X ounces of seitan was just what I had!

So I found a recipe, tweaked it to what I had on-hand and thought would be good and ... wow, these are absolutely delicious!

For the seitan, I used 16 ounces of this seitan (with 1 tbsp garlic powder in place of minced garlic, and replacing 1/2 cup of soy sauce with previous-seitan-cooking-broth, replacing 1/2 cup of water with previous-seitan-cooking-broth and omitting the vegetable broth cubes).

• 16 ounces seitan, shredded
• 1/2 cup walnuts, pulsed in food processor
• 2 tbsp dried parsley
• 1 1/2 tsp dried oregano
• 1 1 /2 tsp dried basil
• approx. 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 1/2 cup Panko bread crumbs
• 3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 1/2 tsp onion powder
• approx. 3 tbsp all-purpose flour
• 1 tbsp safflower oil
• 3/4 cup water
• 1 tsp Ener-g egg replacer
• set aside 2 additional tablespoons of oil for brushing formed meatballs

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
2. Mix egg replacer, oil and water until frothy.
3. Combine remaining ingredients.
4. Add wet ingredients and combine well.
5. Allow to sit for a few minutes, so the bread crumbs can soak up some liquid.
6. Form into meatballs. (I made 28 from this amount.)
7. Brush meatballs with oil.
8. Bake for 10 minutes, turn, and bake for an additional 10 minutes.