Seitanic Red and White Bean Jambalaya

So I have this lovely fresh seitan. What to do, what to do? Since it is a Sunday night and I have no life, I figured I could spare the hour and a half to make Seitanic Red & White Bean Jambalaya. I have no idea what Jambalaya is, but it sounds nice. I just like saying it. Jambalaya, jambalaya, jambalaya.

And with that out of my system..
Cannellini beans are the "white" and plain ol' Kidney beans are the "red" in this dish. I diced the seitan up into chunks and fried with some onion, green capsicum, celery and garlic. Along with the garlic in the seitan, I am grateful my boyfriend is not here tonight. Then I had to add some tomato paste and rice. Before I started this, I saw rice in the recipe and set a pot of rice to cook in my rice cooker. Then I read the recipe more closely and realised you cook the rice in the juice of the meal. So now I have a batch of cooked brown rice in the fridge and an embarrassing explanation of how it came to be.
After cooking all this up with a bunch of spices, it went into the oven for 45 minutes. I don't have a dutch oven so my trusty glazed stoneware roasting pan and some aluminium foil were the substitute. Ten minutes to rest and ta-da! My very first jambalaya.





It turns out that Jambalaya is just a fancy word for casserole. Sure, its a creole casserole but still - reminds me of meals my mum served up in the 80s when casseroles were the thing. The rice was a little stiff but I always find that with brown rice. It does mean it microwaves to perfection the next day though. I had diced the seitan into chunks about 2 inches wide but I have "issues" with texture and it was too much for a single bite. It was chewy and had a meaty texture but too spongy for my liking. I think I could solve this easily by cutting smaller chunks and frying it a little longer. Altogether, it was hearty and gave me a lovely warm feeling in my belly. Not spicy either, which I actually expected it to be. Definitely something to try perfecting in the future.

Simple Seitan

If you are a vegetarian in Melbourne, you must be intimately familiar with vegan parmigiana at the East Brunswick Club. It used to be a Monday night ritual - Monday night parmas with beer and friends. Afterwards it feels like I have a brick nestling in my stomach, but I don't care. They are that delicious. Anyway I am 96% sure these faux-schnitzels are made from seitan, so when I saw the recipe in Veganomicon I knew it would be one of my first projects.


First I was tasked with finding vital wheat gluten, seitan's primary ingredient. I discovered some Gluten Flour on the shelves of the local health food store. A quick google had 6 people saying it was the same thing as vital wheat gluten, and 1 naysayer. I decided to trust the majority. Fortuitously, the same shop also sold nutritional yeast (under the moniker of Savoury Yeast Flakes).

Once home, I mixed the yeast and gluten with tamari, vegetable broth, oil and garlic. I wont lie, it looked like grey spongy dog poo and smelled as bad. Witness..



The recipe then calls for boiling the dough in broth. Apparently one must be quick to catch the boil and reduce heat to a gentle simmer. Since I have an electric stove that takes forever to cool down I had to be on guard. They say a watched pot never boils. It does, it's just really, really boring. I then had an hour to kill while the concoction simmered. I chose to watch Coco Avant Chanel and paint my nails. I learned its really dumb to perform a task that requires you to look away from the screen for extended periods when the film has sub-titles. I will need to re-watch the dvd at some point in the future to work out what the hell was going on.
By now my seitan is ready and it looks.. like slightly firmer grey spongy dog poo. Appetising right? Who knows how it tastes, but at least I have a pound of seitan to use in one of the many Veganomicon recipes that calls for it!




Until I can fix my digital camera, you are stuck with lousy iPhone snaps. No food porn for you!

Chewy Chocolate-Raspberry Cookies

In the summers of my childhood, I always wanted to be that kid who first immersed themselves in the pool by taking a running leap, knees tucked up, small tsunami ensuing. Instead, I was the dork at the shallow end, gingerly dipping my toes in to see if it was too cold. Old habits die hard, even on the path to becoming a vegan rockstar.

Vegan baking isnt foreign to me. Its my ol' reliable for potlucks and punk rock food stalls. I whip up a mean brownie, ask anyone. However I have never made cookies. Why not start now? It seemed easy, all the ingredients were familiar and since my workmates were craving them I figured they could be my first victims.

This recipe called for raspberry preserves. Is that the same as jam? The fact that I dont know is not promising. I scoured the lables in the jam aisle til I found one that said preserves, even though it looked no different to the conserves. Smushed it together with sugar, flour, canola oil, vanilla essence, almond essence, baking powder and cocoa til I had an oily brown blob. Mmmm appetising.
The authors dictated to roll the dough into "walnut sized balls". I let myself believe that in the modern age of genetic engineering, walnuts are now the size of ping pong balls. Into the oven for ten minutes. Wait, ten minutes? Seriously? Awesome! Except when I pulled them out after the allotted time, they were still so soft that when I pressed a finger into one it sank straight to the wax paper. This couldnt be right! So I put it back in for another couple of minutes and then set them to cool. Here is my first mistake. Follow the recipe Lauren, it knows better than you. So my cookies were a little hard. The bigger ones still had a lovely chewy centre but the unfortunate runts could have cut diamonds.

Here is a photo. Aint they purty!




The verdict from my workmates was positive. But I think they may be trying to spare my feelings. I cant taste the raspberry at all, and the cocoa I used makes it taste a little.. bitter? In terms of palate sophistication, mine is Miley Cyrus. Dont expect any poetic flavour descriptions. Or coherent sentences. Its either "delicious" or I'm busy scouring my tongue.
But there you have it - my first Veganomicon recipe down!

My name is Lauren. I'm 26, I live in Melbourne and I am the laziest vegetarian you will ever meet. It is my secret shame. I have been a vegetarian for ten years and I rarely cook anything that doesn't at least partially come from a can, bag or packet.

This is me. I am a huge dork.


As you may be able to discern from my nose, I have Italian blood in my veins. I should be the greatest cooking mama since, well, cooking mama. Instead I find myself coming home from work feeling tired and motivated only to crack the lid off a sauce jar and dump it over some packet pasta.

The thing is - I am pretty sure I can cook, its just that I rarely bother. I needed inspiration. So I borrowed a copy of Veganomicon from the library - the bible in from-scratch vegan cooking. I salivated over every page. I suddenly felt compelled to cook every single dish in that 300 page compendium.
So I decided to do it. And write a blog about it. Isn't that what people do these days? Hey, I've seen Julie & Julia. I cried during the lobster boiling scene. Seriously, when they thrash around and knock the lid off - I was like a baby. Maybe Isa and Terry are the Julia Child's (Children?) of my generation, minus the artery-choking animal products.

So here I go. Cooking my way through every recipe in Veganomicon. Struggling to find the obscure ingredients in suburban Australia. Fucking up, making a mess and blogging.