I made a promise to someone dear to me I'd give up meat. I'm struggling somewhat to be honest, red meat was easy, it's gross. Pork I love but never cook so it's also easy, I hate fish and seafood too so good. BUT giving up chicken is so hard, I eat it so much and I like it
What's the best way to transition away from it? Failure is not an option! I gave myself a deadline of my birthday which is the end of July.
HALP!
Seitan is your answer. Or if you have soy-"meat" slices like this where you live:
Those are ok as well if you want something you can just buy. If you want a good & fairly easy (especially once you've done it a few times) seitan recipe that you can make yourself in <1 hour, this is what I'm currently doing quite often:
The seitan dough:
-2,5 dl gluten flour
-1,25 dl chickpea/gram flour + soy flour (you can choose the portions yourself, I usually use 50% chickpea/gram flour and 50% soy flour. It doesn't need both, but seitan is much better if it isn't just gluten flour but has chickpea flour and/or soy flour in it as well)
-a hefty dosage of spices to your liking (I find that a combination of tons of garlic powder, some paprika, curry powder, ginger powder & garam masala spice mix works really well + I also often use a tablespoon or three of nutritional yeast as well, maybe a tiny bit of salt)
-1,5-1,6 desiliters of water (you might need to add a few droplets if 1,5dl isn't enough)
-a little bit of soy sauce
For the rest you need:
-1,5 liters of water
-2 vegetable stock cubes (the kind that you usually use 1 per 0,5 liters)
-a tablespoon or two of soy sauce
-a tablespoon or two of apple cider vinegar
-1-2 dl of breadcrumbs
-oil of some sort for frying
Mix the flours & spices. Mix the 1,5dl of water & a little bit of soy sauce. Pour that into the bowl with the flours & spices and start mixing it all with a spoon or a fork or something. Once the dough is a bit firmer, you can start kneading it by hand. Knead it for maybe 1-2 minutes. At this point, it should look something like this:
(I'd maybe add a little bit of water if it looked like that, to get most of the rest of the flour to mix into the dough. Not much, not even 0,5 dl or anything, way less than that).
Once it's like that, first cut it into steak-like pieces (maybe 1,5-2cm thick) and then "tap" them to be a bit thinner, even-ish thickness steaks (if you feel any hard-ish lumps at this point, maybe try to cut them out). Throw all the raw seitan-steak pieces into 1,5 liters of boiling water that you've mixed the 2 vegetable stock cubes & some soy sauce and apple cider vinegar into. To save time/make everything a bit faster, you can start heating the water sometime before the dough is done, even when you start making it to once you've got the hang of it, since it doesn't take all that many minutes to make the dough & cut it into pieces when you've got the experience & confidence to do things quickly without having to double check every point in the recipe.
Anyhooo. Cook the seitan steak pieces in the boiling water for 30-40 minutes. Once that's done, take them out of the water, cut each steak into smaller slices like you would a chicken. Throw all the slices into a bowl that has the breadcrumbs and whirl them around with whatever kind of technique you like (I just gently but firmly do a motion that throws the pieces around in the bowl). Then, once it looks like all of the seitan slices have gotten enough breadcrumbs around them, heat up some oil on a (non-stick) frying pan and then fry the breaded seitan pieces on the pan until they have gathered a nice golden brown colour. AAAAAND they are done!
Serve with anything you like. I've used seitan pieces like this in everything from salads to serving it among fried rice/couscous & vegetables and as tortilla filling as well. It's really easy once you get the hang of it. It basically goes
1) mix flour & spices and then water to make the dough
2) cut dough into pieces & cook the pieces in boiling water for 30 minutes
3) bread the cooked seitan pieces & fry them
Really simple. It might require a few tries to get the taste right and the texture can be a bit different each time you make it based on all kinds of things (how long or briefly you knead the dough, what's the ratio of chickpea/gram flour & soy flour, how long you cook it in the boiling water etc.), but I've noticed that now that I've done seitan a few dozen times, there are rarely surprises when it comes to the taste & texture. Sometimes it succeeds a bit better and sometimes not so much, but usually it's still pretty good & edible.
And it's really easy to modify the recipe. Just use different spices or different amounts of the same spices to make some other spice pop out a bit more. I often use garlic powder & curry the most, but sometimes I might make paprika the majority spice. Sometimes I add chili powder if I want it to burn my mouth. You can use or not use the vinegar or soy sauce, but then you might want to try something different.
Some people don't use all that many spices for the seitan dough itself and then just marinade the seitan after they've cooked it. I'm lazy and don't want to go through the trouble of marinading most of the time so I just mix all spices/herbs into the dough. That way the seitan will have at least some base taste no matter what. One can then further marinade it if one wants to add even more taste to it. I just noticed that there's a danger of the seitan being a bit flavorless if you leave everything to marinading even after marinading it, so I'd rather make sure the seitan taste good as is.
EDIT: Also, you can use the left-over cooking water to cook rise or couscous or something similar. No point in throwing the water away since it has all of that flavor from the stock cubes, soy sauce & vinegar. Makes for some tasty rice/couscous/whatever
