Beer Battered Chicken-style Seitan & Mushroom Gravy, Steamed Asparagus

Coconut Chocolate Pudding

Yellow Rose Recipes came in the mail the day before yesterday and I wasted no time in making a batch of chicken-style seitan cutlets. My main gripe with seitan recipes is that the vast majority of them are beef-style.  I’ve said it a thousand times, but I hated red meat even as an omni, so beef-style seitan really doesn’t appeal to me. Hail to Joanna for making an amazing, awesome recipe. If I had kneaded the dough by hand and maybe a bit longer (Kitchen Aid mixer dough hook FTW), chances are I could have produced super firm cutlets that would be omni-friendly as a chicken patty sammich. These are so, so, so, so good.

I’m not real great with breading and frying things yet, but I think I did pretty well with these. The tricky part is in the second frying – the beer batter really doesn’t want to stay put. I think in the future, I’ll try dusting the seitan with cornstarch before battering. The mushroom gravy is pretty good, but I think next time I’ll want to try the Vegan with a Vengeance Punk Rock Chickpea Gravy since it’s a little more suited to my personal tastes. I even remembered to steam up a vegetable, I’m a good kid.

For dessert, I whipped up the Coconut Chocolate variant of the Chocolate Pudding recipe in Vegan with a Vengeance. I’ve been experimenting with pudding recipes lately, and while I do like how this one came out, it’s very ‘homemade’ tasting. If you want something that’s ‘pudding cup’ish, go with the recipe from the Sarah Kramer books that’s basically silken tofu and friends in a blender. I do notice that all of these recipes are all chocolate flavored, and I’m wondering how to go vanilla with it. Extract would be too alcohol-y to try to use a lot, so I’m thinking instead of cocoa powder in these recipes, to maybe use vanilla soy milk powder. Go with vanilla flavor (glycerin based) instead of extract? Hmm… I’ll have to experiment.