vegan lunch box -seitan pot roast..ohh baby!!

Excuse my very long absence. Life is good it has just been busy and it seems I have just been cooking ol'stadbys that I have already blogged about. Nothing really seemed that blog worthy.
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Until last night.
If you have the Vegan Lunch Box Cookbook YOU MUST TRY THIS! pg 119. The wheat gluten pot roast and gravy. Man oh Man! The recipe says it serves 4 w/ leftovers for lunch. But, really it was all we could do to stop stuffing our selves and eating the whole darn roast in one night. My family really loved it. If I knew how good it was going to be I definitely would have made two roast. The only minor substitutions I made was instead of red wine I used 1/4 cup red wine vinegar w/a 1/4 cup water and instead of fresh thyme I used a 1/2 tsp dried. On the side is of course mashed potatoes (1/2 white the other 1/2 sweet I use the pressure cooker w/ about a cup of veggie broth salt and pepper)

sorry about the bad photo
Okay so we did manage to save enough for three sandwiches (lucky kids and honey!)... BEHOLD the beauty! That seitan looks kinda freakishly like the real deal doesn't it? My hubby believes that this would pass with any skeptical omni test. He also wants to try doing this recipe only try to shape the seitan more like a tube to be cut up into burgers and then grilled... mmmm that boy is always thinking.
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Well, I started a post about our summer vacation many moons ago but, never got around to posting it. Here is little Emma enjoying her very first doughnut from Ronald's Doughnuts in Las Vegas.
It was cute - all though she has never seen the Simson she started chanting just like Homer Simson ...mmmmmm doughnuts


Emma has dairy allergy's and has never had a doughnut! The poor kid huh? Well, a couple of years ago her and I were in Seattle and I had tried to make it to the vegan doughnut shop there. But, I got lost and frustrated because of my poor timing we had hit five o clock traffic so we never made it, she still remembers to this day.

I think I made up for it though.

So here she is standing in front of the surgery goodness! All but three trays on the bottom are vegan. The lady behind the counter was SOOO NICE!!
So if you are ever in the Las Vegas area I recommend hitting up Ronalds - as a bonus it's not to far from the Trader Joes.

Back to the kid food- Vegan pizza, tacos, mac &cheese OH MY

From the Real Food Daily some yellow split pea curry soup. Zeenes suggested the tacos from the Real Food Daily in a comment from my last post how to use up some of the left over seitan that the kids weren't wild about. OH MY THIS IS SO GOOD!!!! Thanks for the suggestion!
My taco picture didn't turn out so here is little Emma enjoying hers!

The kids had a guest over one night and I made them a separate dinner. Which then gave me the opportunity to do a very spicy grown up meal. From the Flavors of Korean the cucumber salad (oi sangchae), cucumber noodles (oi kuksu muchim) and fiery tofu (maeun tubu bokum). All of the recipe use the spicy gochujang paste. Honey thought the tofu was the best he had ever eaten w/ the carmelized onions it seem to have a slight BBQ taste to it. Emma LOVES the noodles and has been eating them for lunch.
Some asparagus soup I made up the recipe using a box of leek and potato soup as the base and then added a dash of this and a dash of that. In the end it was okay.. but, not great. From the Vegan Deli I made the curried tofu salad. I was trying to introduce the kids to a tofu sandwich and thought this would be a good one to start with. It has tofu, vegan mayo a bit of curry powder, crush pineapple and raisins. A bit too sweet for my liking but, the kids ate most of their sandwiches. It surely wasn't one of their favs. Not a great photo but that's some baked mac and "cheese". It seems we haven't had in a while and the kids just go CRAZY for it!

Another use for some the left over seitan.. Honey got creative and added some sausage like seasonings to some finely diced seitan fried it up and added some to our pizza. Believe me its under all those tomatoes, green onions, red onions, red pepper and mushrooms so is a bit of veganrella mozzarella. Thanks Honey! Now I will leave you w/ this shot of Emma on her snow slide Daddy helped make for the kids over the weekend. Kleo asked if maybe this was normal for us to have sooo much snow this time of year.. Well, nope under this very spot where Emma's slide is where the tulips were coming up last year at this time. The weather man is calling for YET ANOTHER 8-12 inches headed our way tonight.. only to turn to RAIN tomorrow.. Ohhh what a mess.

still cooking

Awhile back I made the lentil balls from the Vegan Lunchbox and thought that my Honey would love them (he was traveling). The kids were not that thrilled about them and I thought it was the brown lentils so this time I tried it w/ red lentils. I cut down on the cooking time but, they ended up being a bit too mushy and well, just plain not as good as the original ones.

I made some more "beefy" seitan from La Dolce Vegan and covered them in some homemade bbq and baked them. Really good flavor but, the seitan didn't firm up enough for Honey who suggested a light fry after baking would have made this over the top good!
Sweet potato curry. One of Emma's favorites.
Ginger hoisin noodles from the Everyday Vegan. I double the recipe for the sauce and marinated the tofu in it- then lightly fried it up. I used udon noodles instead of rice, which was okay but, would have been better w/ rice noodles I think. Emma LOVED these noodles. Very kid friendly.
From the Real Food Daily- I made the basic seitan in the morning (4 lbs worth!) then marinated it using the Salisbury seitan recipe then smothered it w/ some Golden Gravy(all from the same book). The kids I must say had to be coaxed to eat this one. I thought it was good. I think it was the texture of this seitan more then the flavors the kids didn't like. Everybody in our house prefers the Vegan w/ a Vengeance seitan.. So now what do I do with the other two pounds of seitan? Along side I made Granny's hurry-up dinner rolls. Which were okay.
Roasted pepper Cannellini bean Sauce from Vive le Vegan. Honey liked it - The kids and I -not so much. I added some red pepper flakes to mine.
So, I saw Bazu's post w/ her walk the other day I thought I would share w/ you what our walk looks like.. I am 5'11 and the wall of snow is about eye level. It has been one heck of a crazy year here. We are working our way to braking the snowiest year on record here in Juneau. So far this is the fourth snowiest year w/ about 177 inches the record is 194 inches. The weather forecast calls for yet another storm headed our way and snow likely all week... uuuggghhhh! Yes, I know I live in Alaska but, we live in the rain forest not way up north.

Well, truth be told I don't fair well in hot weather - but, right now I am dreaming of a warm sandy beach and a cool drink something w/ an umbrella in it!

Snow ball fight anyone?

seitan three ways..'beef', 'turkey' and 'ham'

Quinoa and Black Beans (a repeat ). To this recipe I add a can of fire roasted tomatoes and a can of green .
From La Dolce Vegan -Mock Beef and Rice Noodle Toss. Yet another Honey's favorite! The mock beef is kinda freaky stuff though.. It is really "beefy". It was unanimous this was an awesome dinner and the leftovers the next day were even better!
I guess I got stuck in my seitan rut only using the VWAV recipe and was ready to try another recipe. The LDV method of seitan making requires some time investments as you need to deflate the seitan every ten minutes.
After the rave reviews from the "beef" I was anxious to try the other seitan recipes from LDV and decided on the "ham" and "turkey".. Funny, I really liked the "turkey", but Eli and Emma preferred the "ham"- I thought it was just too salty. Overall though the "beef" was by far every one's favorite. I will be sticking w/ the VWAV recipe when I want to make nuggets though it just has a denser texture I prefer.
Here we have a peak into my quesadilla w/ the 'ham' seitan and veganrella mozzarella along side some of my cream of tomato soup.
I used the turkey seitan in this noodle dish. I was winging it and trying to get a creamy noddle dish- sauteed an onion, lots of celery and mushrooms then pureed w/ some soy creamer and plain soy milk seasoned and volia. It was okay, though not great. I think it was the whole wheat noodles I really didn't care for. It was a brand I had never tried before and evidently some are way better then others. Nobody complained though..
Yes, we have been eating an obnoxious amount of carrots lately.. The available produce at the store is in a mid winter slump around here.. Over priced and marginal at best.