My sister has been asking me about the recipes that I cooked out of The Kind Diet, and I have been wanting to do this post for a long time, so here it is. I recently have become interested in eating better and that has led me to reading up on the subject. One of the first books I read was Food Matters.
Then later I watched Food, Inc., A very disturbing documentary about where our food (American’s) comes from. After that movie, you could say I was on my way to at least trying to eat more vegetarian food and a lot less meat and dairy. Being lactose-intolerant makes the decision really easy. When I looked at some vegan recipes I was ecstatic because they were good for me and none of them contained any dairy. These revelations lead me to the book by Alicia Silverstone called The Kind Diet.
The book has her thoughts on kind and “nasty” food in the beginning and then the last 3rd of the book is vegan recipes. So far I have tried about three of them. Here they are:
This is actually two recipes. Rustic Pasta on page 147 and Pecan-Crusted Seitan. What’s seitan you say? Well in this recipe it is like a meat ball, but in the book it looks like a pork chop. All depends on the size of Seitan you can find I guess.
Seitan (pronounced “say-tan”) is a meat alternative.
Wheat gluten, also called seitan, wheat meat, Mock Duck, gluten meat, or simply gluten, is a food made from thegluten of wheat. It is made by washing wheat flour dough with water until all the starch dissolves, leaving insoluble gluten as an elastic mass which is then cooked before being eaten. [wikipedia]
Back to the recipe, the rustic pasta was easy to make and didn’t really need in alternations. The seitan, needed a lot though! The first time I made it I just followed the directions. It makes a ton, and I mean at least 3 times as much as you need for the marinade. At least for the 16 ounces, two packages of seitan that I bought. then of course the breading was WAY too much as well. If you buy the packaged seitan buy at least four packages, 8 ounces each unless your going to alter the recipe. The finished seitan was VERY hearty. I could only eat about four of them.
From the Kind Diet I also made the Polenta Casserole with Seitan on page 223. For this I just bought some fake chicken at Trader Joe’s. It didn’t say seitan, but I was having a hard time finding it at the time (its not sold everywhere), so I found this stuff and thought it would work. I was right it did, but there is one alternation that I need to make next time I make this dish. It called for a ton of water to be added, 5 cups! You can find seitan sold at Whole Foods. I found Polenta at Ralphs where the pasta is.
But if you use polenta that is packaged with water (like above) you don’t need that much water. I would say cut it in half. Well, that is it. I’ll let you know if I try anything else from the book. I did buy the book because I liked it so much. I recommend reading it and I am looking forward to making more of the recipes out of it.
Image credit for polenta tube: dissonance
Image credit for the box of seitan: phil_g