My Beef with Meat Spicy Italian Eat Balls

Taking a little break from UWL today to join my husband in his favorite dinner - pasta and sauce. Well, For me, I'll be having my sauce over stir-fried zucchini and yellow squash.

He's hasn't been too happy with all the very veggie-heavy meals lately, even though I make him cornbread to go with Chef AJ's chili recipes and the other meals have plenty of rice or taters, so as a treat I'm making him self seitan-based meatballs to plop in his spaghetti today. Now if one happens to fall onto my plate when serving, well, I can't help but eat it now, right? ;^)

The recipe is by Jane Esselstyn and she developed it for her brother Rip's book My Beef With Meat.

Spicy Italian Eat Balls
Prep time: 10 minutes
cook time: 30 minutes
Makes 20 to 40, epending on sixe of balls

Add these to pasta night and have an absolute ball! You can also serve them with toothpicks as hors d'oerves and watch them disappear. If you like things less spicy, use less Italian seasoning.

¾ cup vegetable broth 
1 tablespoon low-sodium tamari sauce 
1 fresh garlic clove, minced 
1 cup wheat gluten 
1 to 2 tablespoons Italian seasoning 
1 teaspoon dried oregano 
¼ teaspoon garlic salt (optional) 
1 teaspoon onion powder 
2 tablespoons nutritional yeast 
1 cup Fast and Fresh Marinara Sauce

Pre-heat the oven to 375º. Line a roasting pan with a layer of foil or parchment paper.

In a small bowl, whisk together the tamari, broth and garlic. In a separate bowl, whisk together the gluten, Italian seasoning, oregano, garlic salt, onion powder and nutritional yeast.

Combine the wet and dry ingredients.  Hand mix and/or knead ingredients until there is an elastic texture to the dough. Using your hands, roll dough into balls the size of grapes, walnuts or golf balls. Place the balls onto the lined pan and baste with the sauce.

Bake 20 minutes. 

Remove from oven, rotate & roll balls around, baste with marinara in the pan. Bake 10 minutes more. 

Remove from oven, serve warm over pasta with sauce.

VWG - I always have vital wheat gluten on hand because I've been using it since the 1970's as a meat substitute. When the shipping price started to exceed the item's price at the store I has used since the beginning, The Mail Order Catalog, I started buying the packages from Bob's Red Mill by the case from Amazon with free Prime shipping. It came out cheaper, and since each pound or so was individually wrapped, it was easier to store and less chance of bugs getting into it.

Tamari - I always use low-sodium soy sauce or coconut aminos since I once had a bad allergic reaction to low sodium tamari.

Garlic - My usual cube of Dorot frozen minced garlic to the rescue. It defrosted nicely in the few minutes sitting in the broth as I got the dry ingredients whisked together.

Italian Seasoning - I used my usual Penzey's blend.

Garlic salt - Never. I used plain old granulated garlic.

Marinara Sauce - I used some leftover Hunts no-salt added tomato sauce for this because it was in the fridge. For dinner I'll be using a jar of Engine 2 sauce from Whole Foods that we bought when on vacation. I'm not sure what flavor yet - my husband will pick when the time comes.

Amount - 20 to 40?? Maybe if these were the size of an aspirin tablet! Mine are about walnut size and I barely eked 12 out of the dough. They didn't change size in cooking.

Before and After cooking shots:

The verdict:

I've been making non-meat balls for almost 40 years using many different recipes as new recipes appeared and my dietary needs changed. I've had them fried in a bit of oil, fried in broth or water, fried in a tomato based sauce, roasted, broiled, steamed, and I remember one recipe from decades ago that was boiled. The texture of these was very close to those long-ago boiled ones. Tasty, but gummy. We have lots of leftovers so we'll see if they firm up more after being in the refrigerator a while. If I ever do make these again, I'll keep them in the oven a lot longer, maybe 45 or more minutes. 

Summer is coming rapidly (Didn't we just wear our winter coats last week? Oh yeah, WE DID!!) and I won't be using the oven all that much until late September now. But if I do decide to surprise my husband with non-meatballs again, I'll go back to these by Sarah Matheny. 

Vegan Dad's Corned Beef

Saint Patrick's Day is coming, and with that comes Vegan Dad's Corned Beef sandwiches. Here's the video and link to the recipe for those who missed it when I last posted about it. 


Now all I have to do is find where I put that cheesecloth and that rye bread recipe since the last time I made this.

Turkey Seitan In A Bread Machine

I love seitan. I've been making this stuff since I saw my first package of gluten mix from Harvest Direct, then found vital wheat gluten in bulk in The Mail Order Catalog and have been ordering it from there ever since.

 I have so many recipes for the stuff in all sorts of flavors, but for decades I made it the plain, semi-chicken flavor simmered in a pot of water, because recipes that claimed to make your seitan taste like corned beef, roast beef, even kielbasy, well, didn't. Then I discovered Bryanna Clark Grogan's chickenish cutlets. And Julie Hasson's Italian sausages. And Chef Brian McCarthy's turkey roast (encrouton, of course, for the holidays).


But the main problem with all of those recipes is that they took time to make after the dough is mixed. Cutting and shaping and wrapping and steaming/baking/frying. I wanted something as simple as old fashioned simmered seitan that was even easier to put together on days when I feel sluggish (like now, after almost 2 months of passing the flu back and forth).

Enter this recipe from Lazy Dave! I first read about it in a post on the PPK forums, where the people who tried it loved it. I filed it away to try in the future, a time that never came until the other day. Life has been hectic around here, between the flu and the impending death of the elderly relative I've mentioned in previous posts. She's been hospitalized twice in the past month, and the other day she was sent back to the nursing home in kidney failure and now receiving hospice/palliative care. Since my husband and I are about the only family she has left and we're the ones who have been responsible for her care the past 5 years, we're also the ones who will take care of her burial and estate when she's gone. My husband's job has been crazy the past few months (Remember me mentioning mandatory overtime? That's now going to go on indefinitely.) so we're trying to get as much prepared ahead of time as we can, so that means trips to banks, phone calls to various agencies and departments, and even a trip to the funeral director to finalize the arrangements. The funeral parlor is owned by the aunt's best friend, too, so we spent a lot of time talking with her reminiscing about the fun she and the aunt had over the years. All this while I'm sitting there with a box of tissues and a bottle of hand sanitizer coughing my head off. I'm still not allowed to see the aunt because of this flu but at least yesterday the nursing supervisor on duty deemed my husband non-contagious and allowed him to spend some time with her while I was relegated to a corner of the lobby.

Anyway, I needed to make something to have on hand for quick meals grabbed and eaten on the run, and seitan sandwiches was my former go-to meal, but I didn't have any in the freezer at the moment, and since I really needed to take a nap the other day (I'm still only getting a few hours sleep each night, thanks to this cough) I wasn't able to make traditional seitan because I knew I would fall asleep with it on the stove, and that's not good. Then I remembered the seitan in the ABM recipe I had and dug it up.

My changes:
Wet stuff - there was no way I was going to use an entire half cup of soy sauce! Even the lower sodium stuff has way too much sodium, so I watered it down to half strength, so 1/4 cup soy sauce and increased the water to 1 3/4 cup.
Dry stuff - And I skipped the added salt.

Those were the only changes to the ingredients.

I first started putting the ingredients into my Mini-Zoji bread machine and then thought this may be too much dough for the machine and dragged out my old full-sized Oster ABM. Next time I think I *will* use the Zoji, because the seitan loaf really wasn't that high at all, maybe 2-3 inches, sort of like a slab of over-cooked corned beef on Saint Patrick's Day. Here's a photo of half the log with some chunks I couldn't slice any thinner. The chunks will get chopped up smaller and tossed into a pasta meal later in the week.

One more change I'll make next time I make this recipe (And I WILL make it again) is to use the Light setting on the ABM. Dave used the Medium setting so I did, too, but fresh out of the pan the crust was so hard my sharpest bread knife had a hard time cracking through it. After spending a night in a ziplock bag it softened a bit, but it would be much better with a softer crust to start with.

As far as taste goes, my husband loves it and made himself three sandwiches. He said if I didn't tell him it was seitan he would have thought it real turkey. I didn't think it tasted anything like turkey because all I could taste was the soy sauce. I think that was all in my head, so to speak, knowing how much of that stuff was in there. In fact, I was reminded of it all afternoon and all night, as I'm so bloated my wedding ring and shoes are all tight on me this morning and my mouth has been so dry that glass after glass of water still hasn't quenched my thirst. But of course, some of that may be because of the flu and my constant coughing and frequent sneezes, and another part could be that we did a lot of running around yesterday and the only time I drank anything was when I took my medications in the morning. I wasn't going to be stuck in a car an hour from home and no clean restrooms in sight with a full bladder!

Saint Patrick's Day is fast approaching. Maybe instead of the cabbage dish I have planned I'll tackle Brian's corned beef seitan again. It's another one of those simmering seitan recipes, so I hope I have some degree of health back by then!

Revised Chickpea Cutlets

A recipe that used to be a staple around this house was Isa Chandra Moskowitz's Chickpea Cutlets. There was always at least a half dozen in the freezer at any given time for quick sandwiches or a complete dinner with all the fixings.

Then I stopped making them. I wanted to be a good little McDougaller and avoid all processed foods that these fell by the wayside, as did Julie Hasson's sausages. I started to follow Jeff Novick's advice and just add extra vegetables and greens to a lot of dishes, like our weekly pasta meal. Yes, all those extra veggies did add bulk, but not satiation or even much flavor. About 2 hours after a veggie-heavy dinner we were both hungry again. My husband, being a non-McDougaller who's the same weight at age 62 that he was when he graduated high school, reached for the cookies and potato chips and I would either white-knuckle it and eat nothing (and be awake half the night with hunger pangs), eat some fruit or more veggies (and be awake half the night running in and out of the bathroom), or make the occasional on-plan quickbread (which didn't keep me awake but gave me weird dreams).

Then I used some crumbles in a VeganMoFo recipe in October and it almost brought tears to my husband's eyes having "real food" back again. I then used some more the other day in a tater tot casserole recipe and got the same response.

He also wanted more to our pasta then just veggies and so I made a batch of Julie's sausages. We used 2 of them for the three of us (plus leftovers) and the rest are in the freezer for future meals.

During the blackout after Sandy we had to toss all the perishables from the refrigerator and freezer, leaving only things that really didn't need to be refrigerated but we kept them in there anyway:

Yes, my refrigerator is this small-the left wall is right after those water bottles - you can see a few molecules of it in the upper left hand size of the photo. If I raise that top shelf up one notch the bottles and milk container hit the top. The freezer is only about as large as that second shelf, the one with the nooch. 

The rice milk is unopened, the lettuce was only 2 days old and is un-refrigerated in the store so we decided it would be fine in there for the 2 more days it would take to eat it; our son doesn't mind warm soda, and the many times the stores display the dairy cheese (American cheese-like food product) in un-refrigerated cardboard displays so our son said to keep those, too. Surprisingly, the temp in there never rose above 50, probably because that was the room temperature most days, too.

One of the things tossed was my husband's beloved hot dogs. Every day off work he would eat 2 sandwiches with 3 dogs total for lunch. It took 20 years to get him to stop putting a slice of cheese on each sandwich but he would never give up the dogs, nor would he eat veg dogs like Smart Dogs or any of the other brands I tried. But after we got our power back and we started to restock the fridge and freezer he told me not to buy any more hot dogs, that he would eat "something else" for lunch on those days. For the past 2 weeks we were lucky and I had "planned-overs" ready for him, but this week - nothing. There isn't a leftover in the house and I know there won't be any after today or tomorrow's dinners.

First I made up another batch of Jeff's burgers, the Southwest this time, but he usually complains they're too much for lunch, that he'll want something lighter.

Chickpea cutlets to the rescue! I found the recipe in my AZZ Cardfile program and made a double double-batch of them and used the tomato paste instead of olive oil option and cooked them like I always did, in the oven. Here's how they came out:

As you can see by these cooled ones, they do have an orangy tinge to them in places. The quadruple recipe made over 20 cutlets (I used my ice cream scoop to get uniform sizes, just perfect for a burger roll) plus a few tester meatball sized pieces. This is the first time I used tomato paste instead of oil (Gasp! Yes, I used oil in the past!) and contrary to some of the commentors comments, you do taste the tomato and they are a bit drier. I'll see if he notices the difference this weekend. I placed this entire batch into the freezer with circles of plastic cut from container lids between them so they don't stick together. When we're ready to eat them we just remove a few, place on a plate and nuke for less than a minute. Always perfect for a quick sandwich.

Next week I plan on making Bryanna's chickenless cutlets (no recipe, just a photo - sorry) and soon maybe dabble in regular seitan loaves again.

Yecch!

The seitan sucks. I kept it at a simmer - Isa and the PPK gals taught me that - but this thing looked like a steaming pile of grey brains in that cheesecloth. There was no cohesion - the whole thing was crumbly, and I remember reading somewhere that this happened to others, who compared it to under-cooked ground beef. Yep, that's about it.

I thought maybe I can wrap it up in foil and toss it into the oven, maybe that would do something to it, but before I could do that I tasted some of the crumbly pieces. Yecch! It tasted nothing like corned beef at all. I chucked the whole mess into the garbage. I'm really disappointed and now kicking myself for not picking up a hunk or real corned beef to cook, one of the few meat meals we eat all year.

I hope my husband won't be too disappointed. If he is, he can always call Blimpie. Our local franchise (Blimpie Base #2, IIRC. #1 is in Hoboken, about 10 miles away) makes corned beef sandwiches every year on Saint Patrick's Day. Of course, there are also about a dozen mom-and-pop delis between our house and Blimpie, but they don't deliver like the Blimpie Base does.

All those spices, wasted. I finished up the caraway seeds and only have a bout a teaspoon of the fennel seeds left. My hand is sore from crushing them in the mortar and pestle I've had since my nursing school days back in the 1970's. My sink was so greasy I had to take a Brillo to it, and the bowls and utensils needed a good scrub with grease-cutting Dawn to get them clean again. That'll teach me from veering away form tried and true recipes. That stew just better taste good or I'm really screwed as far as today's dinner goes.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

This Irish gal is making a traditional Irish dinner today.

For starters, I'm making a stew loosely based on this recipe from the old McDougall recipe forum on VegSource. Very loosely. In fact, all that recipe did was put the idea of adding cans of tomatoes into the stew. My stew is about 6 Yukon Gold potatoes (peeled and chopped), a small head of cabbage (chopped), 6 carrots (peeled and chopped), 2 onions (chopped), 2 cans of plum tomatoes (broken into pieces), a few cloves of chopped garlic, and about a quart of veggie broth. Just plop it all together in the biggest pot you have (I had to spread it over over 2 pots - Yikes!) and let it simmer all day so the house smells fantastic and the concoction cooks down to this melt-in-your mouth Irish stew.

Every stew needs its bread, and I'm making a plain loaf of whole wheat with some instant potato flakes tossed in for flavor.

And to go with the stew and bread, corned beef seitan from the recipe by Brian McCarthy found here on Everyday Dish. I've been meaning to make this since I first saw the recipe a year or so ago on that site but never got around to it. This year, it's now sitting in my biggest pot simmering away. This is why my stew had to get split over my next 2 smaller pots. I really have to get myself a nice big soup pot.

For the past week I've been playing all my Irish/celtic music CD's and even watched Feet of Flames twice to get myself in the holiday mood. Man, I love how Michael Flatley dances, but that man has an ego the size of all Ireland! LOL