Winter Slow Cooked Seitan Pot Roast

For those of you in the UK you'll know what I'm talking about when I tell you how much the media is warning of heavy snow. We don't really get that much in the way of snow within the UK, so anything more than a sprinkling and it's time to panic.

Anyway, when the weather is cold I want to fill my belly with stodgy food. I don't normally go crazy for fake meats, but I'm rather fond of seitan, and a this is a rather 'quick' dish as the seitan can cook in the slow cooker. Yes, you need to spend ages with it actually cooking, but it only takes a very short period of time in the kitchen. If you have a slowcooker with a timer on it, or a slowcooker and a plug adaptor with a timer on it if you are like me, you can quickly make the seitan and brown the veggies either in the morning or the night before and set your slowcooker to finish when you get home from work. There is not much nicer then coming into food ready to serve up.

I followed a recipe called "Not Your Mama's Pot Roast" from Robin Robertson's Fresh From The Vegetarian Slow Cooker, however, the recipes is available on-line here.

If you are vegetarian, vegan or just an omnivore looking for a little more variety in your diet I can't recommend this book enough. As a vegetarian, I barely used my slowcooker, thinking it was mainly for the occasional stew and only really of use to people who cooked meat. This book provides a lot of very tasty, easy and totally vegan recipes. Check it out :)



Some little changes I might suggest is using a little more water to make the seitan, making it in a breadmaker and chopping it into chucks to make it a little more like a stew then a roast.

If you are in the UK and curious as to where to get seitan quick mix, I just use 'gluten powder' purchased from http://www.flourbin.com The shipping costs are a little still, but you buy a decent amount it's not a huge issue. Compared to the costs of buying store made meaty chunk things it's perfectly reasonable, and much more variable.