"Chicken"-fried seitan.

I have probably said umpteen times that I almost never make a recipe exactly as written. While I haven't created many recipes of my own, I adapt recipes enough to make them my own. Of course, it's easy to throw seasonings in flour, coat tofu or seitan, and fry it up, and that's what I did tonight. It takes less time if it's seitan because you don't have to press it the way you do tofu.

I just threw a bunch of seasonings into flour, dunked seitan slices in soy milk, then the flour mixture and fried it in a fry pan, simple as that. I am going to tinker around with the flavorings a bit to come up with the right flavor, but this is still quite tasty. Oh, yeah, I pretty much never make a recipe the same way twice either. I had my seitan with a nuked potato and some salad. I know, not exciting, but such is life. I'll have to make more seitan this weekend--this is the second part of the batch I made--to store in my freezer.

Little trick I use: if a recipe calls for bell peppers, and they are out of season and outrageously expensive, buy bags of frozen bells. They work almost as nicely in a recipe, and for the most part, the measurements don't really matter. Besides, little strips of red, yellow, and green bells are so much nicer than just plain old green. And unless it's beans, I avoid most canned vegetables like the plague; I buy canned beans because I just don't want to take the time to soak dried beans. But the only canned products I buy are beans, lentils, tomato paste, chopped tomatoes (for stews), water chestnuts and bamboo shoots, the latter two being my faves for a stir fry. If you're concerned about salt, check the sodium content and find the ones with the fewest ingredients and the lowest sodium count.