Beer Bathed Seitan Stew

The last week has been pretty crazy, what with the hurricane and the power going off, then on, the gas crisis, no food at stores, and most stores not being open. It's so much worse along the shore, the things I complain about sound so trivial. I haven't cooked in a while, since the power just came back on, so last night I decided to cook something new from Terry's new cookbook. I had to drive half an hour to a store that had produce, and caught the luckiest break at a gas station, I only had to wait 20 minutes. I felt like I won the lottery. So I came home chipper, and made a ton of seitan. Seitan cures all sorts of blues. Everybody knows that.

This was fun to make, though I wish I had a chance to make the seitan the day before, since it takes a while to cool after baking. Then you can get started cooking it-- if you can stop from popping pieces into your mouth. Seitan makes it pretty impossible for you to miss meat. Also, mushrooms are an amazing thing. I have been in love with mushrooms since childhood. I have a memory of getting a party size pizza and taking all the mushrooms off the pizza and piling them on my piece. Anyhow, this recipe is made to rival the traditional Belgian stew, Carbonade Flamande. Ever heard of it? Me neither.

This is a bowl of good stuff. It was pretty simple to make. I feel like you should make this for your meat-and-potatoes dad who thinks tempeh is a kind of spiritual dance and that gelatin comes from the seeds of schnozberries. He would eat it in the blink of an eye, in a house with a mouse. And he would like it too.

It was really easy to make. A good thing to make on a night you don't need to do anything special (except eat this). It has plenty of downtime, to relax, flip through your new beautiful hardcover cookbook, see all the pretty pictures, bookmark what you want to make.. Oh, and I made some oven fries to dip! No picture of the fries, but you can picture oven fries no prob, right?
Pick up Terry's new book, Vegan Eats World, and make something awesome, like this!