Wine Marinaded Seitan Recipe

Grilling is a huge activity in my family. Huge. We do it literally every weekend, weather permitting. It's cheap, it's fun, it keeps us entertained for hours. The Other Adult recently purchased a metal fire pit which really isn't much of a pit IMO, but actually a metal bowl on legs. Whatever--it provides light and heat for night grilling, which has opened like a whole new world for us.

Our normal grilling fare includes corn on the cob, grilled eggplant sandwiches (recipe to come sometime in the future), and kabobs with mini heirloom tomatoes, mushrooms, onion, pepper, squash, tofu dipped in barbecue sauce and wine marinaded seitan.

Seitan is a relatively new staple item in our refrigerator. It's kinda like tofu but it's made from wheat gluten, and its texture more closely resembles real meat. Unlike tofu, which seems to have no inherent flavor, seitan has a veggie-brothy kind of flavor that also makes it a little more meat-like, even without any additional flavoring.

Seitan is totally delicious and it has a lot of practical applications in the kitchen. I recommend it for any vegetarian. We use it in fajitas, stir fry meals and vegan chicken nuggets. I buy our seitan at Whole Foods and have a hard time finding it at other stores, but the Other Adult's parents, who live in rural-ish Illinois, have managed to find seitan at their local supermarket. Grocery stores that stock seitan usually stock it with the tofu and other refrigerated vegetarian or health foods, or sometimes with the refrigerated Asian food products.

The seitan marinade recipe I use is adapted from this recipe on veganappetite.com. I adapted the recipe for the ingredients I had in my cupboards the first time I made it, and I loved the results so much that I haven't modified it.

Wine Marinaded Seitan
8 oz seitan, cut in chunks
1/4 cup red wine (I use 2 buck chuck, shiraz:)
1 Tbsp soy sauce
1 Tbsp minced garlic
1/2 Tbsp fresh rosemary chopped
1/2 Tbsp thyme
salt and pepper
olive oil
3/4 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp dried leaf oregano

Combine ingredients and marinade seitan for at least one hour. I usually save the leftover seitan for the next time we grill, so sometimes it marinades for a week.