Guess Who's Coming To Dinner?

Seitan (pronounced say-TAN, not Satan like my crazy family seems to think)

Note to chef of the family: If you've never tried this product before DO NOT take your smart-aleck children and spouse along with you to the store. I never heard the end of the devil jokes. Even while preparing dinner, my youngest child was still making remarks about having demons for dinner and how it wasn't very vegetarian.

So why use seitan? It's a protein alternative to soy. I regularly use textured soy protein for comfort foods (tacos, dinner loaf, etc), but I want to balance it out with other forms of non-meat protein. After reading up on it I found that it's made from wheat (so my celiac friends won't be able to use it) and has been used in various forms of Asian cooking for many years. I even saw a youtube video on how to make your own from scratch. I'm not that brave when it comes to trying new foods. I chose the packaged variety.

I decided to use seitan to satisfy a craving for beef teriyaki. I made it with fried rice tonight.



Ingredients:

Prepare the night before:
2 cups cooked rice (we use Jasmine rice)
1/2 - 1 pound prepared seitan marinating in your favorite teriyaki sauce.

Before eating:
2-3 eggs beaten
1/4-1/2 cup diced onion
1-2 c frozen/canned peas and carrots
3-4 tbsp soy sauce (we use low sodium so I can salt it later)



With a bit of olive oil in a saute pan, saute onion till translucent and then add peas/carrots and heat till warm. Next add the rice to the pan and drizzle with soy sauce. I always make sure I chop up big clumps of rice as you don't want to take a bite and still have cold rice.



When blended well, push the rice to one side of your pan and add the egg mixture. Don't worry if some peas decide to make their way to the eggs. It will turn out well. Scramble eggs as usual and then incorporate into the rice mixture.



I've never cooked seitan before, so I wasn't sure how to go about it. What I did was dump the contents of the bowl (marinade and all) into another frying pan and heated over warm till the teriyaki sauce was a bit thicker. I imagine you can add it to the same pan as the fried rice, but I have picky children who like things separated. Here is the final outcome:



Review: My kids don't eat fried rice, but they ate the seitan with plain white rice. I think the organic/natural teriyaki sauce I bought at the health food store was a bit spicy for my taste. I think next time I will try another variety of sauce, but the texture of the seitain was very good. Hubby and I will be eating this again.