I love this from the bottom of my black heart. It does figure that a black metal vegan chef would have to make seitan at some point, and he’d have to make the obvious pun. Just so you know though, it’s pronounced “say-TAN”, emphasis on the second syllable. Won’t affect your delivery in a metal voice though!

MAMelby linked that video to me in response to a thread on Facebook where I asked for some of your favorite seitan recipes. Here’s some of the ones that were sent my way:

Surly Amy apparently makes a mean shiitake mushroom seitan, and I’m not just saying “mean” because she’s a fellow feminazi bully.

And Josh, Token Spokesgay has an all-purpose basic seitan recipe, which apparently can be made in 20 mins in a pressure cooker. One of these days I’ll get a pressure cooker, and it’ll be all Josh’s fault. This is almost certainly what I’ll use as a base for my own experiments.

There’s this recipe, which is apparently vouched for by both Corrine Zimmerman and Steve Fritz, for barbecue “ribs”.

The recipes appear to be versatile enough to make sausage too. I’m looking forward to experimenting with this.

The common factors all seem to be beans and nutritional yeast. Some have vital wheat gluten, so if you have friends with Celiac’s or gluten intolerance, be careful. There are some variants to take care of different textures, too. Otherwise, everything else appears to be “season to taste”. And that, I can definitely do. For what it’s worth, my taste would likely entail garlic, smoke, onions, and soy sauce and/or worcestershire sauce. I would start there and add spices for different intended effects.

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There’s this dish passed around among Acadian families called Coquilles St Jacques, a French dish involving scallops and white wine sauce covered with Gruyere and baked in clamshell dishes. This isn’t how I was shown how to make the dish at all, though, and it seems every family does it a little (or a lot) differently. This is no Alton Brown recipe; it’s not an exact science, more of an art. Through a large number of modifications, I’ve come to a rough outline of a recipe, though my way of making this recipe is incredibly flexible and forgiving, so you could easily modify it to your tastes. I’m calling it Coquilles Maudit Jason, with “maudit” meaning “damned”, seeing as how I’m not in any way a saint.

I’ve included a number of options, including a choice between white wine sauce and savory gravy. If you try this, let me know how you’ve modified it in the comments below.

Ingredients:

1/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp paprika (half sharp?)
Black pepper to taste (1/8 tsp)
(optional) 1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
at least 2 lbs seafood – scallops, shrimp, haddock, salmon, lobster/crab
4 tablespoons butter (can use shortening or leftover bacon grease)

(optional) White wine sauce:
[ 8 oz fresh mushrooms, sliced
2/3 cup white wine
1 cup bread crumbs ]
OR
(optional) Gravy:
[ 6 oz canned mushroom steak sauce or lobster sauce
1 extra tbsp cognac
1/2 cup milk ]

1 bundle scallions, chopped
6 cloves garlic, minced
3 lbs potatoes
2 tbsp Cognac
2 tablespoons butter, melted
1/2 lb grated Gruyere cheese
Six or more oven-safe clamshell dishes (or other oven-safe bowls)

Preparation:

Cube, boil and mash potatoes to taste. Season as you like. Recommend sour cream, sea salt and parsley flakes, and leaving the skins on. This can be done in advance.

Mix the flour, salt, paprika, (cayenne), pepper together in a large bowl. Chop all the seafood to, at largest, 1cm cubes. Dredge it all well in the flour mixture. Sift out extra flour mixture for later use in roux if necessary.

Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Sweat garlic and shallots, remove and set aside, leaving butter. Add the seafood mixture and sauté, browning the flour. With this much seafood, you may have to do this in batches and add butter as necessary — don’t overload your pan. Set aside in a covered dish to keep warm; mix in garlic and shallots evenly.

White wine sauce:
(Optional sauce: Sauté mushrooms, stirring frequently, over medium-high heat until beginning to brown. Add the white wine to the pan and scrape all browned bits into sauce. Reduce the heat slightly and simmer until the sauce has reduced by half. Stir in 2 tbsps cognac and seafood, mix thoroughly.)

OR:

Gravy:
(Optional sauce: At medium heat in your same pan, heat through mushroom steak sauce or lobster sauce with 3 tbsps of Cognac. Add milk and seafood, flour dredge will act as a roux. At medium-high heat, stir to a rich gravy. If not thickened to your liking, you can add some more flour mixture saved from earlier.)

Preheat oven to 400F. Line oven-safe dishes with a layer of mashed potatoes. Fill each dish with seafood mixture filling, leaving room for generous helping of Gruyere on top. If using white wine sauce, add a bed of bread crumbs on top before topping with Gruyere. On a baking sheet, put bowls in oven and bake until cheese is melted and starting to brown (~20-30 mins, depending on your dish shape – watch carefully). Any extra seafood mixture (and with the loose-weave proportions I’ve given, this is likely!) can be frozen and used later in stews or more Coquilles.

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Even at Thanksgiving, even as a child, I was always “that kid”, who couldn’t leave well enough alone when someone said something blatantly false, or worth questioning and examining further. My father kept admonishing me to be on my best behavior for company, which invariably meant not challenging unevidenced or ridiculous beliefs.

This was one of the ones that filtered into my subconscious and I even caught myself thinking this very thing a few years ago, til I was corrected on it. All because I was asked to turn off my skepticism as a child.

I guess I’m posting this to tell you not to squelch people’s skepticism of strange unevidenced beliefs even if those beliefs are seemingly harmless.

Unless you know there’s absolutely no goodwill to burn, let the walking Snopes database do their thing, because as annoyed as the person may be who is corrected, they’ve actually had a valuable service done to them even at the cost of a little holiday peace. A service that helps insulate people from making mistakes, and having factoids filter into their brains as though they were facts, which might introduce errors in their reasoning later in life.

And if there’s absolutely no goodwill to burn at the Thanksgiving table, and you must suffer the tyranny of someone spewing factoids, both harmless and harmful? Well, consider a smaller and more intimate Thanksgiving meal next year.

But yeah. Sorry for the tangent. Turkey doesn’t cause food comas. And I wish I could spend the American holiday with my American friends and family, so enjoy your time with them. And I hope you find a balance between the factoid-spewers and the fact-checkers so you can all enjoy your meal.

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Someone tweeted a link to this story a few days ago. The story happened in May, but it’s chilling in light of current events.

The Conservative government is pitching the change as a way to cut red tape and provide greater flexibility to slaughterhouse operators.

But the New Democrats are raising a red flag saying the move invites possible “contamination” of the food supply.

“Under the present regulations . . . it has to come in alive, be slaughtered on site,” said NDP MP Malcolm Allen (Welland), the party’s agriculture critic.

“Now you can bring in dead stock. It’s okay to bring in that animal into a slaughterhouse, have it cut, wrapped . . . for human consumption.

“The real fear is how did it die, (and) under what circumstances did it die.”

[…]“As for concerns that this amendment may allow unfit animal into the food supply system, this would not be the case.”

“CFIA inspectors, including veterinarians, are present daily during operations at federally registered establishments to verify that food safety requirements are met. All carcasses are individually inspected to protect the health and safety of Canadians,” he said in an email.

Considering the ongoing crazy-big beef recall which has been expanded YET AGAIN, is it any wonder Mulcair’s calling for the resignation of Ag minister Gerry Ritz? The government is not doing its job, and loosening restrictions that impede profit at the expense of safety as is the Conservatives’ MO is not exactly what I’d call protecting the health and safety of Canadians. Bad enough that under the current regime, the meat recall got as bad as it has. Could you imagine if they had to contend with yet more disease vectors?

The post Wayback: remember when Harper’s government wanted to process dead animals too? appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

May want to check your ice boxes.

OTTAWA, September 21, 2012 – The public warning issued on September 20, 2012 has been expanded to include additional ground beef products because the products may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7. Previously identified products included in this recall can be found on the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) website at www.inspection.gc.ca/recalls.

The CFIA is warning the public, distributors and food service establishments not to consume, sell, or serve the ground beef products described below because the products may be contaminated with E. coli O157:H7.

This recall also includes unlabelled and/or unbranded ground beef products available for sale from August 24 through September 16, 2012 and sold at retail stores not identified in the CFIA’s product list below, which may include small retailers, local meat markets and butcher shops, etc. Therefore, the CFIA is advising consumers who are unsure if they have the affected ground beef product in their home to check with the store(s) where the product was purchased or throw it out.

Full list available here. A little diligence to avoid bloody diarrhea is a decent trade-off.

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Not only am I only celebrating the secular part of the holiday, I’m doing it in such a manner that onlookers might think I was the single most evil person in the universe for doing it. See, for lunch, I’m eating deviled live baby chickens, whole.

The beak’s a little crunchy, putting it at odds from the rest of the chick’s squishiness, but what can you expect?

Idea shamelessly stolen from this image.

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I present to you, via wanwan.fm, for the low price of $4.50, the Happy Kitchen Candy Hamburgers kit direct from Japan. And it apparently tastes like the real thing.

You have to spend precious candy-eating minutes preparing all the parts, including microwaving the burger, bun and fries. It’s part toy, part “food.”

O SCIENCE, WHAT HAVE YOU WROUGHT?!

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No, Pat. It’s usually yellow-orange. Depending on what kind of cheese you use, it might even come out completely white.

I apparently missed this with all the hustle and bustle around this past Thanksgiving. I would have demanded we include a course of mac and cheese had I seen this in time. Well, there’s always Thanksgiving ’12.

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