#seitan

It’s cool holmes 🤘

Here, check out this ugly-ass seitan I whipped up in my filthy kitchen this weekend. It looks like satanic chocolate chip cookie dough… but it actually tastes very good.

and yes - kitchen got cleaned.

Limited context, @snails-and-tangerines and I are getting a house together with two of our other friends, and this will be the first time I've had my own place proper that wasn't parent/gaurdian/dorm. I am very excited, and seeing as I like to cook I've been putting a lot of thought into different meals to make, how to meal prep effectively while in college, and eat well on a budget. I should also note that while I grew up vegetarian, and I AM predominantly vegetarian now, I'm not really trying to be vegetarian, it just usually works out like that.

Over the past month or so, my Pinterest board for recipes has grown quite a bit, and I noticed recently that the tags that pinterest has assigned to me are a lot of "vegan" or "health food" etc related. I cannot stress this enough, I am not *trying* to be overly healthy, or go vegan or even alter my diet from home immensely, just eat balanced and affordibly. But because I enjoy a lot of Asian cuisine and I'm over here looking up tofu and seitan (wheat gluten protein) recipes, pinterest has tagged me as such, because in western society, those are health foods, not foods.

I've cooked for my friends before, dishes where tofu as a protein base makes complete sense, and most people give me at least a funny look when I tell them, they hesitate, and then I've never actually had anyone say they don't like it.

And like, I kind of understand why this is, these aren't mainstream foods here in the west, but at the same time, the idea that its "flavorless" or "trying too hard to be healthy" is so stupid to me. Its just food. Humans around the world used the ingredients they had to make food, and here we are, eating it! Every time I tell someone that I don't know that I don't eat much meat they ask me almost verbatim "what on earth are you eating then?" Because they cannot fathom a meal without meat, a meal where meat isn't the the central eentre, and I'm left asking, "what are you eating where meat IS???".

I feel kind of an underlying push back on these "alternative" proteins because they aren't Meat Cause We're 'Merican^tm. And why, is it because they're associated with hipsters? Which then get associated with left wing individuals so eating tofu is now the woke agenda? Is it that the bovine and poultry companies have lobbied so Incredibly Hard for basing the American diet around meat that its now deeply ingrained in the culture, leaving us with high cholesterol and heart disease? Is it racism? My guesses are there's probably a mix of each of these. There's another angle in here about how gluten free food got labeled as "stuck up healthy food" instead of just a nutritional need for those with Celiac's but I digress. . .