I've been wanting to make seitan (a meat alternative made from wheat gluten) for ages. Yesterday I decided I should make my favorite Tikka Masala recipe (from Jamie Oliver's book Jamie's dinners), veganize it and add homemade seitan chicken. So that's what I did today. It all tasted awesome, but seeing as how the seitan took almost an hour and a half and the Tikka Masala took almost an hour I realized that it might have been a good idea to make the chicken a different night. My boyfriend had the same as me, except with real chicken (yuck) instead of the seitan chicken. Of course it is an improvement because he had the veganized sauce but I still would have preferred that he had the seitan too.


Here is the seitan cooking. The gluten itself has no flavor, so to make it more like chicken it is cooking in the chicken flavoring from LDV. I was a little worried, because the Tikka Masala recipe calls for the chicken to be marinated for half an hour in an Indian yogurt sauce and I wasn't sure how the flavors would go together, but it ended up being really good. I was impressed. The recipe made more seitan than I thought though so I only used half of it in the Tikka Masala. The next time I make it I'm going to double or triple the recipe as it keeps for up to 6 months in the freezer. I love convenience foods.


Here's the "chicken" marinating.


The only thing I don't like about Indian food is that it always looks so boring. This dish was absolutely wonderful, but you wouldn't know it from looking at the boring brown stuff over rice... As for veganizing the recipe for the sauce that was very easy. I simply substituted soy cream for the yogurt and the cream in the recipe. I would have used soy yogurt, but the only kind we could find had strawberry flavor. I swear, I just saw the regular kind.

On a different note 'Becoming Vegan' and 'Vive Le Vegan' arrived today. I was excited (as always) my boyfriend however asked me if I didn't have enough books about veganism already. The answer is, of course, NO! Silly boys. Will probably be cooking some more tomorrow as it is Sunday and I'm off work, so I'll try to take more pics.