VeganMoFo Day 9 and Lettuce Wraps

Though today was a tad bit cooler than yesterday, I was still craving salads. Seeing that it is MoFo I wanted to have something a bit more interesting. What is fun about being vegan is veganizing recipes. I picked this recipe from an Eating Well newsletter. You can see the original recipe here. It was very easy to veganize as you can see. DH and I loved the "meet" filling. Oh, and just to let you know. It makes enough to feed an army. We will be eating lettuce wraps for the next few days. Granted that is not too much of a struggle since I had to tell myself, "Stop eating!" I am trying very hard to live by the rule to only eat when I am hungry and not because it tastes so good and trust me these taste really good. We had brown rice and yes a salad with it. I just couldn't help myself. :o)

Five Spice Seitan and Lettuce Wraps

1 cup cooked brown rice

1 teaspoons sesame oil

1 pound ground seitan

1 tablespoon fresh minced ginger

1 red bell pepper, finely diced

1 green onion, sliced

1 8-ounce can water chestnuts, rinsed and chopped

1/2 vegetable broth ( I use no chicken broth)

2tablespoons hoisin sauce

1 teaspoon five-spice powder

1/2 teaspoon sea salt

lettuce leaves for wrapping.

1/2 cup chopped or chives

1 large carrot, shredded

I use stainless steel cookware so I heat my pan, spray with cooking spray, and add the sesame oi. Once it is hot add our seitan and ginger. Cook until it reaches your desired doneness. Stir in the cooked rice, bell pepper, water chestnuts, broth, hoisin sauce, five-spice powder and salt; cook until heated through, about 1 minute. To serve, spoon portions of the turkey mixture into lettuce leaves, top with herbs and carrot and roll into wraps.

Enjoy and Happy MoFo

VeganMoFo Day 8 and my trip to the Far East

This is the second time I have tried to post this, but blogger ate my previous attempt. So lets try again. We are in the middle of a heat wave here in Sunny Southern California. When I left work, I work downtown fairly close to the beach, and it was 94 degrees I knew it was going to be a cooker inland where I live. I was right, 105 degrees. Right then and there I decided there would be no oven cooking tonight. Stove top steamer was the way to go. I broke out this book, Natural Meals in Minutes to a recipe I have been dreaming of making.

Chinese Steamed Buns, page 36. I was really getting into this. First I made the filling, the one listed on the same page is the one I used, but you could use any type you like. The filling was chocked full of my kind of Asian flavors, green onion, garlic, fresh ginger, cabbage, and five spice powder to name a few. By the way, the filling is absolutely spot on! The bun part called for a fine whole wheat flour so I chose whole wheat pastry flour. Once I got my bamboo steamer out and the water heating I began my journey to the far East. Now the filling is done and is fantastic so I have high expectations for the bun recipe. As I began the process, the doubts began to appear and they only continued to get worse as I went along. My flour seemed a bit grainy compared to my idea of fine flour, but being the MoFo trooper that I want to be I continued on.

Off to the steamer they go. While they were steaming away I began my quick loosly based Asian Coleslaw. Shredded cabbage, grated carrots, red bell pepper, tomato, and some quickly roasted sunflower seeds all lightly topped with an Asian style dressing. I really loved this!

This is where my doubt and disappointment begins. The buns come out of the steamer and I decided to cut one in half and take a picture so all can see, but the bun was just that, bun. The filling was this tiny line across the bottom about 1/16 of an inch from the very bottom. I was so bummed. Too much dough and not enough filling. To try and save my dinner I cut off three-fourths of the bun and came up with these.

Well time to plate and go enjoy my trip to the far East.

In the end, I still needed to scrap out what filling I could and mix it with my coleslaw for dinner. All and all the flavors were dynamite, but when you waste all that time and ingredients to not have you meal turn out like you planned sucks!

PS. you can go on amazon website to the book and search inside. It lets you read the page for these buns. Maybe someone out there will have better luck.