Irish Stew
We've got some snow on the ground now and the highs have been about 10 above and Thanksgiving is over so it was time to make some Irish Stew.
A steaming bowl of this with a rye/wheat roll and some Irish Breakfast Tea sure hit the spot...
My only substitution was to use button mushrooms - portobellos are not readily available here in the middle of nowhere...
Irish Seitan Stew
My first post on the Vegan Cook-a-Long! How exciting!
I'm in serious fall cooking mode, drooling over root vegetables and digging myself in like a hermit for cozy evenings out of the rain. Recently, I scanned a bunch of stew recipes for ideas and modifications and came up with this seitan stew. It's been years and years and years since I had proper Irish stew (i.e., carnivorous) but this tastes very close to the flavours I remember. It's pretty darn close to the recipe found on
fatfree.com.
Ingredients
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 cups seitan -- chunked
1.5 cups carrots -- washed and chopped
1.5 cups portobello mushroom, wiped and chopped
1 cup onion -- chopped
1.5 cups potatoes -- washed and chopped
2 bay leaves
1 tsp dried rosemary
1 tsp garlic -- minced
1 tsp dried basil
1 Tbsp tomato paste
2 cups water
4 tsp tamari soy sauce
1 Tbsp Worchestershire sauce (vegan)
1/4 cup celery -- chopped
4 Tbsp water -- cold
3 Tbsp cornstarch
Directions
1. Saute seitan in oil over medium heat in a large pot until seitan crisps up a bit.
2. Put veggies (except celery), herbs and spices into the pot. Saute in a little water or veggie broth at medium heat for about 8 minutes, stirring to prevent burning.
3. Add tomato paste, water, Worchestershire and tamari and bring to a simmer. Cook about 10 more minutes or until veggies are soft. [I used pretty big chunks of veggies so cooked it quite a bit longer in this stage]
4. Add celery (added at the end to help retain color and texture).
5. Mix the 4 T cold water with the cornstarch in a small bowl. Turn off heat under stew. Vigorously stir in cornstarch solution. Turn heat back on under stew and stir until thickened.
Number of Servings: 4 - 6 but it feels like it feeds an army!
Serve with mashed spuds and a winter ale. Lovely!
Sorry, at the time I didn't think to take progressive photos. Here is the end result steaming away in the stew pot.
Brown Rice Stuffed Peppers
I thought I'd try out the stuffed pepper recipe before I served it for Thanksgiving Dinner. I baked them in little custard dishes because I thought it would be cute...
I put a couple of tablespoons of water in the bottom of each dish and wrapped it in aluminum foil...
Served here with turnip greens, baked sweet potatoes, cornbread and homemade applesauce - the menu for Thanksgiving will be more traditional...
A closeup - I should have moved the potato - so you could see the pepper better...
The custard cup thing didn't really work out for serving - as we wanted to cut the pepper up with the stuffing.
My substitutions were Brown Rice - millet is not readily available here - but I think I'll order some before Thanksgiving as we liked the flavour of the stuffing and I'm sure it will be even better with millet. And I had to use all dried herbs as fresh herbs are not readily available here either. It was a very tasty and pretty dish.
Millet-Stuffed Peppers
I just made these tonight and devoured them! If you feel like being a bit creative but still using roughly the same amount of time to make dinner,
this recipe is worth it. I talked about it in my personal blog
here.
Labels: millet, peppers
