Seitan!

Nothing says "Christmas" like a big batch of good, old-fashioned seitan. Also, I had some veggies that were about to go completely bad.

I used the recipe for seitan from Vegan Planet by Robin Robertson, but here's a seitan recipe
from Allison Wunderland that's very similar but doesn't really provide amounts. Here's another recipe through Associated Content that has actual amounts, if you're into knowing that sort of thing.

Also, the Vegetarian Resource Group has a nice little intro to seitan which provides a fair amount of information on its origins, and some really tasty-looking recipes.

The Vegan Planet recipe calls for a big amount of flour -- I just happened to have a bag of whole wheat flour that was languishing in our pantry -- and calls for a simmering broth made from your classic stock-type veggies like carrots, celery, garlic, and onion, and some soy sauce and bay leaves. The house smells like soup!

I made seitan once from a mix, so this is my first foray into making it from scratch. Apparently some recipes call for mixing spices right into the seitan, like poultry seasoning for chicken-flavored, or fennel and pepper for sausage-flavored, etc.

Just checked the seitan in the pot -- it still seems kind of gooey and it's about half-way through the cooking time. I hope I did it right. We'll see. If it turns out well, I'm going to make the fam some seitan strogranoff, combining the recipe from Vegan Planet with the one from the Vegetarian Resource Group. That was what we made with the from-the-mix seitan and it was so tasty.