Category: Food

In the 1970s, I just called it gluten globules. These days we call it by a fancier name — seitan. The fancy name makes it sound hard to make, but nothing could be easier. It’s a fantastic and versatile meat substitute.

In the 1970s, I actually isolated the gluten by washing the starch out of a dough made from unbleached flour under running water. That’s for the birds. These days, you just start with gluten flour.

You’ll find recipes for seitan all over the Internet. It’s just a dough made of gluten, cut with other ingredients that tenderize it (such as chickpea flour) and seasonings. Then you shape it and pre-cook it by simmering it in water or steaming it. Then you fry it!

Seitan made from only gluten would be very rubbery. By adding chickpea flour, soy flour, barley flour, or brewer’s yeast (or all or some of those), plus some olive oil, the seitan becomes tender. You can adjust the “bite” of the seitan by varying the proportions. You can season it as a chicken analog, a pork analog, a beef analog, a sausage analog, or no analog at all. Ingredients to consider include tomato paste to redden it, soy sauce to darken it, Worcestershire sauce, barbecue sauce, garlic powder, curry seasonings — let your imagination be your guide. I have found that seitan steams beautifully in the Cuisinart steam oven.

I’ve written here before about my deep suspicion of the anti-gluten movement. Sure, a small percentage of the population truly have a gluten problem. But speaking strictly for myself, my Celtic genetics love gluten, and you’d have to kill me to make me give it up. Seitan is one of the best high-protein, low-carb, earth-friendly proteins I know of.

I’ve been on my low-carb repentance diet for about a week now. Technically, the roasted carrots are a no-no. But I skipped breakfast to earn the carrots. Over a period of three years, I’ve let my ideal weight creep up by five pounds. It’s no carbs for me until the five pounds are gone. But I’m not going hungry. It’s really very true that, on a low-carb diet, you really don’t get very hungry.

Continuing in low-carb mode, the daily question is: How do I use all these eggs that the chickens are laying and also keep carbs down. Frittatas (frittati?) quickly come up on the list.

This frittata is made with artichoke hearts, Trader Joe’s fake sausage, some grated gouda cheese, and a teensy bit of potato. It’s garnished with yard onions snipped on the way back from the chicken house with the eggs.

I think that a well-seasoned iron skillet works best for frittatas. The frittata may be done before the top browns, so be ready to throw on a little extra cheese and hit the top of the frittata with the broiler for a few minutes. Beat a little cream into the eggs to make everything nice and fluffy. Don’t even think of using milk! The frittata should rise a bit in the oven, particularly around the sides of the skillet.

Soon there will be asparagus frittati.

Barley, pea, and chickpea curry with raw walnuts and seared cabbage

The seasons are changing. Spring is scampering in on little rabbit’s feet. Soon the snakes will be stealing eggs again. The apple trees are blooming. The chickens are laying. The birds are singing. It’s time to repent for the sins of winter comfort foods — breads, pot pies, dumplings, and even sweets — and get the carbs down.

For now, at least, I’m going spicy. Walnuts and barley and legumes — or so I’m resolved — need to dominate for a while. Eggs are abundant. So there ought to be omelets. There ought to be eggs for breakfast — but no biscuits! A couple of days ago I had deviled eggs for breakfast, with sliced avocado. That worked.

I figure that my winter sins compel me to lose four or five pounds as penance. I’m hoping that I can do that by forsaking comfort carbs for a while.

For curries, I’ve learned to keep not only curry powder and other curry spices in the kitchen, but also pastes such as Thai red curry paste and harissa paste, which is an African pepper paste. I mix them up until I get the color I want. Spices know no national boundaries. Curries also are perfect for using your coconut oil.

And remember, anything rice can do, barley can do better. It’s amazing that such a satisfying food has such a low glycemic index — 25 or 28. Even risotto is no carb crime if you use barley. I’m not even all that fond of rice. Pearled barley — especially when mixed with good spices, healthy fats, and a legume such as chickpeas — is as meaty as hamburger. The Roman gladiators, after all, were called “barley eaters.” Plus, I suspect that rice is all too often an ecological crime. It can be efficiently grown only where there is naturally lots of water, and California is not that place.

No more carb crimes here until I’ve done my spring penance.

Cold weather came back. As a consolation, and to mark the transition off of winter cooking, I made a pot pie.

Pot pies are not something I commonly make. But I am clear on two things on the theory of pot-pie making. For one, the crust must be generous, meaning that you want both a bottom crust and a top crust. And, for two, the crust soaks up a lot of gravy, so it’s tricky keeping the gravy from coming out too thick. I always seem to err on the thick side.

What really gives a pot pie its savory flavor — at least in my near-vegetarian opinion — is not the chicken or some other poor animal. Rather, it’s the savory vegetables, particularly the celery and peas. You can’t have too much celery.

Still, a vegetable pot pie seems to be missing something. For lack of any better options, I cut a Morning Star hot dog into little rounds, browned them lightly, and added them to the filling.

A small convection oven is really handy for pies, especially a pie with a top crust. You can keep a very close watch on the pie to see how it’s browning. I started this pie with a foil covering to keep it from browning too fast. Then, when I was sure it was done inside, I removed the foil and browned the crust with just a touch of broiler.

And yes, my philosophy is that the filling should ooze ever so slightly through the vents in the top crust. You lose points if there is any leakage where the top crust is sealed to the bottom crust. I lost a point on this pie with a one-drop leak.

I am not strictly a vegetarian, but I seldom eat meat. I pretty much never cook meat at home, partly because I hate looking at and handling raw meat, and I detest the mess it makes in the kitchen. So, if I eat meat, it’s because I’m out and about.

Pork barbecue is one of the few foods that North Carolina is famous for. North Carolina barbecue fits into two regional categories — eastern barbecue, and what we farther west call “Lexington style” barbecue, because Lexington, North Carolina, is ground zero for it.

Michael Pollan, in his 2013 book Cooked — a natural history of food — uses North Carolina barbecue to illustrate cooking with fire. North Carolina barbecue is slow-cooked and smoked over savory woods. It is served sliced or chopped with a sauce that is heavy on vinegar and reddened with tomato. It is frequently served with a slaw in which the cabbage is dressed with a sauce similar to the barbecue sauce.

This barbecue sandwich (Lexington style) is at Fuzzy’s barbecue at Madison, which is in Rockingham County. I stopped at Fuzzy’s and ate what the natives eat while waiting for my Jeep to have its annual safety inspection.

P.S. Note the spoon that came with the side serving of slaw. I am not certain whether it’s a regional thing (with Stokes County as ground zero) or a new, less local element of cultural decline in the past few years brought about by the Republican Party and the rolling back of the Enlightenment. But, increasingly, if you order certain foods in local restaurants (beans, for example), you may get a spoon with it and no fork. When this happens, I am instantly paralyzed. One might eat certain deserts with a spoon, or soup. But everything else is eaten with a fork. I would as soon eat slaw with a spoon as vote for a Republican. 🙂

Everybody makes banana bread, right? Like me, you probably have a standby basic recipe. Still, it’s good to experiment, especially with ways to make banana bread a little healthier.

Not many years ago, saturated fats such as coconut oil were deemed to be very bad for us. Now some sources, at least, encourage us to eat coconut oil in modest quantities. The problem is, the taste of virgin unrefined coconut oil is not compatible with many baked goods. But with banana bread, it’s a different story. Coconut oil can be substituted for all, or part, of the butter.

Banana bread also works great with heavy flours such as sprouted whole wheat flour. Sprouted whole wheat flour, however, is very thirsty. I added half a cup of milk to the recipe to help moisten two cups of sprouted whole wheat flour.

The glaze is strawberry preserves and honey thinned with a bit of rum. Some of the whipped cream went into the coffee.