Seitan ribz sandwiches (Thankfulness #6)

It's Sunday and I'm still blogging! What! I had like, the best Sunday ever today, which leads us right into:

Thing I'm thankful for #6: that there are so many small but wonderful pleasures in my life.

Today I: had someone else (Josh) make me breakfast, went to the beach and played in the sand with the Emperor (though we had to leave due to rain, but then we had a great rain walk), went on a lunch date with the Emperor, drank a cup of chai tea while eating a gingersnap and reading a good book for an hour while the Emperor napped, caught a short nap/snuggle with the Emperor at the end of his, got new pajama pants (something I have been putting off for about six months, when my last pair literally fell apart), had a leisurely cooking session followed by delicious dinner, took a nice warm shower with a fancy shampoo bar and nice soap, and am now lolling about in nice soft pajama pants and my bathrobe and blogging.

Any one of these things alone would be delightful. To have a whole day full of such nice things? Ah, bliss. Of course, not every day can be like this. But my life is full of these compact but wonderful events.

Speaking of that delicious dinner: tonight I made the Seitan Ribz (and the accompanying Rough Rider Barbeque Sauce) out of Vegan Diner by Julie Hasson. This is the cookbook for this week's PPK challenge and I have been putting off cooking out of it for the past 2 weeks so I could blog about it this week. And that has been hard, because there are SO many things in here that I want to try!



These ribz? Super easy to make. And yet, super good. They're like the Morningstar Farms veggie riblets except the sauce is better (not as sweet, despite being mainly made out of ketchup) and the texture's better and actually, I just like these a lot more. They make a fabulous sandwich... I actually could not quite finish mine and left some bread uneaten so that I could maximize the amount of ribz/sauce I could ingest without busting a gasket. Oh, we had broccoli on the side, too.

I did eat my broccoli even though it meant not eating some of my bread. Mmm, broccoli.

Here are the ribz pre-saucing:



Will make again. One of the simplest seitan recipes I've ever run across and really quite wonderful.

This was maybe the Emperor's dream dinner. I cut up a couple of ribz for him, and gave him a big serving of broccoli and a small piece of roll with Earth Balance on it. (The past couple of days, he has been obsessed with Earth Balance. He calls it butter and tries to get me to put it on everything.) I think he ate 2 or 3 ribz (out of the 16 the recipe made), his hunk of bread, and 3/4s of the big serving of broccoli. I was surprised he would touch the ribz because, like I"ve mentioned, he's super weird about sauce. But I guess his seitan love overrode that.

I'm sure if I make him this exact dinner again, he will refuse to eat any of it. Oh well.

Here he is looking at the rain during our truncated trip to the beach: