Sunday, August 11 Seitan Souvlaki Rating: 4.5

This is one of those meals I reverse engineered in my meal planning. We had some tzatziki in the fridge from about a week ago and it really needed to get used up. I remembered a recipe by Robin Robertson for seitan souvlaki from a VegNews issue from a couple of years ago. Turns out, it was the 10^th Anniversary issue. Anyway I made it once way back then, but I think I only used the seasoning mixture on some seitan I already had rather than making it fresh, because I don’t remember it being this good. Naturally, since the seitan takes an hour to cook and then needs to cool, you need to do this on a day when you have the time to devote to it. Seitan is one of those things that seemed so mysterious to me when we first went vegan. Even after those many, many years as vegetarians, we didn’t eat much of it, and what we did eat was primarily at Chinese restaurants in the form of vegetarian beef or chicken. My first attempt at homemade seitan wasn’t spectacular, but it wasn’t horrible either. After a few times, I got the hang of it and now it seems so simple. There are a lot of really good recipes for it out there, and I’ve learned that if you’re making something specific like this, use the recipe the author suggests. Some things, like stews, are fine with any kind you may have on hand. I usually have some of at least one or two different flavors in the freezer. It keeps really well for a really long time. Anyway, I made the fresh seitan for dinner and once it was nice and chilled and firm, I cut it in half, used half and stuck the rest in the freezer. Since we don’t have anywhere to grill at our apartment, we just used the grill pan. The veggies were onion, bell pepper and grape tomatoes. We also had some corn, which I roasted while I grilled the rest of dinner. It was all super yummy good.