Day 130 -- I Ate It -- But Can I Say It?

In my quest to try the Holy Trinity of meat substitutes -- tofu, tempeh and seitan -- I ticked off tofu early and now I can tick off seitan.  But before I started blogging about it, I had to learn how to say it.  Was it see-tan?  Or say-tahn?  Or say-tin?  And where to place the accent.

According to this online dictionary with a handy "man in a can" announcer, the pronounciation is SAY-tan.  Kind of like the devil, Satan.  So, now that I figured out how to say it, I can talk about it.

I've tried many new foods over the course of the past four months, but my rate has sort of slowed over the past month.  But now I can add seitan to the list.  Seitan is wheat gluten flavored with soy sauce.  It's kind of rubbery and chewy, a bit like chunks of cooked steak.  I think it comes in a block but the only seitan I could find in the store came in bite size chunks.

I decided to try it in one of my favorite dishes, my Cremini Mushroom Stroganoff.   I stir-fried a sliced sweet onion and about a pound of sliced Cremini mushrooms, then added the drained seitan and 4 cloves of minced garlic.  My sauce was:

2.5 cups vegetable broth
1.5 T. cornstarch
4 T. nutritional yeast
3 T. tamari sauce

Add this at the end, bring to a boil to thicken and then serve over pasta or quinoa with a dollop of vegan sour cream.  Yum!

And just an interesting bit of info.  Did you know that white button, cremini and portobello mushrooms are all the exact same mushroom, Agaricus bisporus, just different stages of maturity?  Cremini and "Baby Bella" mushrooms are the same thing!  So white (button) mushrooms are the youngest, portobello are the oldest and cremini are in between.  I did not know this!