Dill Seitan ‒ Tilliseitan

I've written about school meals and most hated memories about them before. But one of the classics of those dishes is still tilliliha (dill meat). The name itself has become kind of a symbol of how badly cooked institutional kitchen food can be. It was banished from schools before my time however, so I've never actually tasted it before.

But as I already told you, we have a nice bed of dill growing, so the first dish we came up with that would contain a lot of the stuff was dill seitan. This is not a new idea. Tofuhead and Nomad from Elitefood have also posted a version of the same dish. I have no idea what the cookers of the 50's did wrong, but this one turned out absolutely delicious. The combination of sour and sweet, perfected with fresh dill and cream worked so well we both licked our plates. I'm almost certain this version is much closer to the dish once popular during the beginning of the century than the one so loathed by many.

- 1 portion of seitan
- 2 carrots
- 1 small piece of celeriac
- 1 white part of a leek
- 1 punch of fresh dill (or 2-3 tbsp dried dill)
- 5 dl broth (the one you cooked the seitan in serves well)
- 2 dl oat cream
- 50 g margarine
- 3 tbsp wheat flour
- 2 tbsp white vinegar (some modern versions use lemon juice)
- 2 tsp sugar
- 10 allspice fruits
- 1 bay leave
- salt (if the broth doesn't already contain some)

Melt the margarine. Shift in the flour. Keep turning them around for ten minutes or so, being careful not to turn them brown. Add the broth, as well as the peppers, the bay leave and half the cream. Chop the veggies into the pot as well.

When the sauce has thickened, combine it other ingredients. Chop the seitan into mouth-fitting chunks. Wash and mince the dill. Finalize by adding vinegar and sugar according to your taste buds. The amounts I've given here are here to give you some direction, but really you should taste how much the sauce needs.

Enjoy with potatoes or barley.

Nutritional values / 1861 g:
energy 2147 kcal
fat 92 g
protein 187 g
carbohydrates 133 g
fiber 24 g

Plum Seitan ‒ Luumuseitan

Though I actually eat them rarely, plums are among the tastiest fruits I know, be it straight from a tree or dried ones. Chocochili's seitan dish reminded me of a simple meat dish my mum used to prepare although BBC's original pork version of it doesn't look like that at all. But at the same time, there was something so christmassy in this I thought I'd save it for December.

When I finally started cooking, I noticed I was out of vinegar so I replaced the stock part with red wine (and had to finish the rest of the bottle as well so it wouldn't turn into vinegar). Oh poor me. Also, I assumed the plums in the original are fresh ones so I doubled the amount for dried ones and dismissed the sugar. So finally, I ended up with a treat like this:

The seitan:
- 3 dl seitan flour (aka gluten flour)
- 1.5 dl pea flour (or chickpea)
- 0.5 dl soy sauce
- 0.5 dl rape oil
- 2 garlic cloves
- smoked pepper powder
- water (just enough to make it stick together, about 1 dl)

The rest:
- 1 onion (or 10 pickled spring onions)
- 10 dried plums
- 1 carrot (or celeriac)
- 4 dl red wine
- 1 dl tomato sauce
- 1 dried chili
- anise or star anise (I bet salmiakki would work as well)
- cardamom
- juniper berries

Mix the seitan ingredients. Slice into strips and drop into boiling water. Precook about half an hour (I like to season the water with some stock). Slice the onions and the carrots. Halve the plums. Combine everything in a casserole. Let the plum seitan simmer for 45 minutes in a 175ºC oven. Thicken the marinade by boiling it together in a sauce pot and return on the seitan (or if you're lazy like me, just sprinkle some potato flour on top and stir).

Serve with mashed potatoes.

Nutritional values / 1272 g:
energy 1890 kcal
fat 54 g
protein 143 g
carbohydrates 139 g
fiber 21 g

Beer Pots with Potato Crust ‒ Olutruukut muusikuorrutteella

To make the best of those awesome colours of the trees right now I tried to imitate them for the perfect autumnal Sunday dinner. I've never really learned how to use pumpkin so I was going to put some into this. However, I only managed to find huge halves that cost about 10 euros a piece. That's a bit more than I'm ready to pay even for domestic veggies. So instead, I bought 3 kilos of rutabaga with one euro. We'll see where I manage to cram them.

Oh, by the way, the colours of these couple of last photos aren't that awesome. That's because I thought I'd just use my camera's inbuilt flash and filter the ugliest direct light with a yellow dishcloth. Getting the white balance even close to natural after that took me longer than preparing this dish. Maybe next time I understand to fetch a real flash even if the Simpsons is about to start.

- 1 small rutabaga
- 1 large carrot
- 1 celeriac
- 10-15 brussels sprouts
- 0.5 l beer, for example Sinebrychoff Porter or Fuller's London Porter
- 2 dl seitan flour
- 0.5 dl rowan berries
- 1 chili
- 1 dl nutritional yeast
- 1 dose of stock
- white pepper
- 4 potatoes
- 1 dl oat cream
- dragon's wort

Squash the rowan berries and the chili. Make a paste of them and the seitan flour. Add some as well water if needed. Cut the seitan and the vegetables into strips and sauté them. Add the stock, the yeast and some white pepper.

Cook the potatoes. Mash them together with the cream and the dragon's wort. Never apply a blender or other sharp blades to potato unless you want to get glue.

Next you'll need four small oven pots. If you're going to use normal mugs, first check that they're meant to last in the oven. Unfortunately, cheapest ones rarely are. Portion the veggie and seitan mixture into the pots. Pour the beer on them. Scoop the mashed potatoes on top. Put the pots into a 175°C oven until the potato mash starts to turn golden from the edges (about half an hour).

Serve with pickles and lingonberries.

Nutritional values / 1 pot:
energy 357 kcal
fat 7 g
protein 24 g
carbohydrates 36 g
fiber 8 g