Tonight we had ginger-and-orange-glazed seitan on quinoa; spring greens with blueberries and apples; and roasted sweet potato puréed with a little agave and my favorite spice for baking or for seasoning winter squash or pumpkin:
It's from Penzeys, and the star anise is what makes it brilliant.
I made the seitan from scratch, from the Real Food Daily Cookbook Chicken-Style Seitan recipe.
I like this recipe because it uses cannellini beans and garbanzo bean flour in addition to the wheat gluten, so it seems less like a hit of pure gluten. None of us has a problem with gluten, so I think seitan is a great high-protein occasional meat alternative, especially when I make it at home. Most of the supermarket meat alternatives don't seem like much of an option, with their highly processed soy, and sodium, and preservative chemicals.
I browned it in a cast-iron skillet and then made a quick glaze with freshly squeezed orange juice, grated ginger and tamari. I served it with stir-fried carrots, cauliflower, scallions and rainbow chard stems over quinoa. The organic rainbow chard was so beautiful at the market today, the stems were all shades of lavender/violet pink and bright golds and red and deep purples. It's always such a scramble right at the end to get it on the table while everything is hot. Especially since R asks for miso soup with every dinner now. I'm glad she likes it, but there is another extra step. I cut the scallions on the fly. They taught us in cooking school to cut our scallions so elegantly, into slender little O's. I didn't realize how shameful these are until I took a close-up picture. But it's just family dinner on a Wednesday, and it was good.
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