As much as I have tried to avoid this pun, I just can’t. This soup was of satan. (Satan/seitan..get it? Bahaha. Ok. Enough.) Seriously, though, I had it on my meal plan for weeks. Months? If I had seitan, I didn’t have barley. If I had barley, I had forgotten to soak it. If I’d soaked it, I didn’t have Worcestershire sauce. Bah. So, on the day of the Beef Stew, the soup stars aligned and we had two huge pots of stew/soup.
This wound up being problematic. There really is only so much soup you can take in a week. Lunch..dinner…dinner..lunch…Freezer. I have no idea how well this will do in the freezer. I tend to think that the tempeh in the beef stew will do better, but that the barley in the seitan stuff would do better.
On a different note, this was my introduction to seitan. I was actually pretty impressed by the look and texture of it. Next time, I will brown it first, but even without that, it held it’s consistency pretty well.
In fact, this could be a “fool ya” meat alternative. I’m already brainstorming what I could use it in. It’s much denser than tofu, so the texture itself shouldn’t give it away. Maybe fajitas?
In any case, it worked in this soup. Hubby liked it better than the beef stew, but I was learning with tempeh, too, so that could have affected things a bit. The barley was a new one for us, too. It was worth the soaking time. The texture was a bit thicker and heavier than rice, which I liked much better in soup. This is definitely going on my winter meal plans…as long as I can remember the barley. And the seitan. And the boullion.
Nutritional highlights:Loads of protein and iron. Really. 20 g of one, 11of the other. You can’t get this out of a can, man.
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