Last Night's Dinner was . . .

Amazing! We had barbequed seitan, smokey collard greens, and corn bread. My inspiration for the meal came from one of my favorite cookbooks, The Vegetarian Soul Food Cookbook. I've had the book for years so by now, I don't really need to follow the recipes step by step but this dish always comes out fabulously. Instead of making seitan the traditional way, I used the seitan sausage I made using the steamer and this recipe (which is a bit milder and neutral in taste than the first one I used and really love), which lended itself to the very intense flavors of this dish. It was fabulous . . . we loved the texture in this dish way better than traditional seitan not to mention that making steamed seitan is far easier (in terms of clean-up, time, etc . . .). For my barbeque sauce, I used the recipe in Tofu Cookery as a starting point. There's nothing quite like freshly made BBQ sauce with molasses, mustard, brown sugar. And when you carmelize that onto freshly made seitan and sauteed red onions . . . well, wow. For the collard greens, I used a very simple recipe:

Smokey Vegan Collard Greens
1 bunch collards, chopped into bite size pieces
2 tbsps. Earth Balance margarine or olive oil
1/2 one large red onion, coarsely chopped
3-4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/4 tsp liquid smoke seasoning
1/2 tsp hot sauce (or more to taste)
1/4 tsp sea salt (or more to taste)

Saute the onions in the Earth Balance until translucent in a good sized pot (that way you don't have to be chasing collards). Add the garlic. Add the collards, liquid smoke, hot sauce, sea salt and about 3-4 tbsps. of water. Cover the pot and steam for for 5-10 mins., depending on your personal preference (I like mine to still have some crunch). That's it!

And then the cornbread was pretty much the icing on the cake!

But wait . . . there was cake! Carrot Cake!!
















Everyone really enjoyed the whole meal!!