Same
Today I'm cooking with a new protein.
If you’ve ever wondered, how many times can this bitch eat tofu with a carb and vegetable? Well, same. The unglamorous answer is probably infinity, but for the sake of dopamine I’ve been thinking I should pretend it’s not. I’m especially fond of the house made pepperoni at our local vegan deli and a couple weeks ago when E was ordering dry goods in bulk online I thought hey, I could learn to make salty, trashy, fun food like that! So he put vital wheat gluten in the cart. Tonight we start with something simple: spaghetti and meatballs.
I read a lot of recipes for vegan meatballs over the weekend and after much deliberation, decided to go with an umami-rich base of vital wheat gluten, walnuts, black caviar lentils, water and a few castelvetrano olives, then flavor it with nutritional yeast, soy sauce, dried oregano, mushroom seasoning and confit garlic from the freezer—all blended in a food processor until a dough formed. I rolled 1/4 cup scoops, nestled them into my steamer basket* and cooked for 30 minutes in a large pot with the lid on. Later I’ll fry them off in olive oil. I can already tell they’re going to turn brown in such a pleasing, nutty way.
The rest is easy enough: 99 cent dried noodles from Trader Joe’s, a jar of red sauce leftover from last week’s pizza, a bunch of herbs from the garden. On the side, “salad” and a blood orange Spindrift.
*It was a Miyazaki-style cute scene thanks to E, who recently cracked the black plastic handle off the steamer basket and replaced it with a beautiful wooden one.