1. Seitan (pronounced say-TAWN) is delicious! We went to Hellbender's Burritos last week just to try seitan for the first time. It's another meat substitute, sort of like tofu, but even better! It's actually wheat gluten, and I have discovered that I can make it at home. It has the texture of the inside of a good piece of chicken fried steak. It's taste...well, just like tofu it takes on the flavor of whatever you put with it, but I would describe it as carb with a hint of meat. I'm hoping to try and make it at home sometime in the future. I'll post an entry on how that goes.
2. Rice milk is yummy! Scott is an Oreo-aholic. Luckily, they are vegan since there are no dairy ingredients involved. But to keep it inline with how we try to eat at home (no eggs; little or no dairy), we needed a replacement to his beloved milk. He tried vanilla soy milk, but it didn't have the right taste. We bought vanilla almond milk. Again, yummy, but not the right taste. The last attempt was vanilla rice milk. And with this, we are close to dairy milk. It has that vanilla taste, but more importantly it has the creaminess you would associate with dairy milk. Next time he gets Oreos, we're going to try plain rice milk because I'm pretty sure that's going to be pretty darn close to the real deal! I'll let my beloved readers know how that works out.
3. 2 tablespoons of corn starch dissolved in 2 tablespoons of water makes a great egg substitute! I went hunting for something called ENER-G, which is a powdered egg replacer. I've seen it mentioned on lots of the vegan websites I patrol. I finally found one lonely, leaking box of it at Good Energy in Elkins. It was almost $7.00 for the box, and it looked as though it had been there for awhile. I looked at the ingredients and reasoned that surely there is something in my kitchen cabinet that will work the same as this expensively priced leaking box! So, I kindly placed it back on the shelf and resolved myself to more hunting online for more ideas on how to replace eggs in recipes. The other day, I found what I was looking for: corn starch. Tonight, I made corn bread from a mix that called for milk and egg. I used water (could have used soy milk, but I was low) and the cornstarch mix. Worked great! The only difference I could see was that the cornbread was maybe slightly more crumbly (but it's cornbread), and it didn't have that usual golden yellow color.
4. Hellbender Burritos in Davis has the best vegetarian menu around! They have wonderful burritos and several of their specialty burritos are vegetarian. They also use tofu and seitan in some of the burritos. Oh, and the queso is phenomenal; the best we've ever had!
5. Vanilla soy milk and cereal in the morning will provide desperately needed protein. Scott had headaches the other week, and we've attributed them to not enough protein. In the past, even before our veg life, he has noticed that hunger, or more specifically low protein consumption can trigger a headache. The culprit this time? We were using rice milk with our cereal. Rice milk has only 2 grams of protein per serving, versus 9 grams in soy milk. Good thing we like soy milk!
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