BBQ SEITAN BOWL

I like bowls of food. Call me old fashioned. The food stays warmer for longer, it's easier to put together the bite you want, and it's not going to run off the dish onto the floor when you're eating very zealously. Making a bowl is mostly an exercise in assemblage. This bowl had seitan, marinated and fried, sauteed greens, and black-eyed peas, overtop mashed potatoes. I'm not going to write all the recipes for these items, because honestly, none would be mine. I've included links below. I will gesture towards one trick I use when making this kind of thing. The homemade seitan is cooked in broth, and the broth can be really delicious. After the seitan is made, and I'm cooking with it, I use the broth in all my side dishes. The mashed potatoes have broth in them. The greens have broth in them. The black-eyed peas actually don't, but they could!

Seitan:
I make a lot of homemade seitan. For any Dunedinites who stumble on this blog, the Indian grocery store on St Andrews has gluten flour for cheap! I used the recipe here: http://www.theppk.com/2009/11/homemade-seitan/. I made the broth a little tastier by using more stock powder (I use Massel's chicken style), and adding wine and garlic.

BBQ sauce:
I made some BBQ sauce a month or two ago from an excessive quantity of apricots I had ordered via my workplace. I just googled a recipe online. It was alright, but maybe the fruit wasn't as sweet as it could have been (?). It was a tad acidic. I wouldn't feel comfortable vouching the recipe regardless. The vinegar just didn't ever settle into a more subtle and flavourful form. I did fry the seitan in the sauce and some vegan margarine, and it tasted pretty darn good. The more fat the better, obvs.

Greens:
I sliced up an onion and 3 cloves of garlic. I used a bag of greens I purchased at the farmer's market. The bag had kale, spinach, silverbeet, I think maybe even basil... other stuff... it was a really good assemblage. Anyhow, I cooked the onion and garlic in the seitan broth for a while, letting the moisture cook off before adding more. I probably added 4 ladles of broth, each time letting it cook off. Then I added the greens and another ladle. It turned out really well!

Black-eyes peas and mashed potatoes:
I made these extra basic. I want a good black-eyed peas recipe though. There was this BBQ bowl I used to get in Portland, and the black-eyed peas were dreamy. One day, I will recreate that bowl!