seitan tikka masala

At the end of June, Drew is headed off to China for a year. He's going to do a language program and his dissertation research. I'm not looking forward to this, so I've been trying to find the silver lining(s). There are very few (no snoring and no sitting through action movies comes to mind), but one of them is meat. 

To be clear, Drew does not care if I eat meat. I never ate a lot of it anyway, and I've gone veg twice- once about 15 years ago and the second was just a few years ago. I prefer eating a mostly vegetarian diet, and most of the time, I don't miss meat.  

I began making a mental list of restaurants to visit and meals to cook when Drew leaves. It's not that he refuses to go to some of these restaurants, it's that these sorts of places have no veg options and I'm not going to relegate him to a meal of french fries or a side salad so that I can eat, say, seafood. On occasion, I do play what I call the "meat" card, in which we go to a restaurant where he must eat a meal of sides, but I try not to abuse it. Fortunately, this isn't an issue in Southern California; we've been able to find good restaurants where we can both be satisfied. 

I came across this recipe for chicken tikka masala in Bon Appetit a few weeks ago, and I immediately thought to myself "I'll make this when Drew leaves." But then I realized that, like so many recipes, this one could easily be made vegetarian. We could have used fake chicken, but we decided to make up a batch of seitan instead. Seitan is made with vital wheat gluten, and it has a firm, chewy texture. Drew and I used to buy it, but it's way cheaper to make and very easy to do. We use this recipe from Post Punk Kitchen.  

This tikka masala was very easy to make. It requires some advanced planning, but there's a lot of downtime, what with the marinating the seitan and simmering the sauce. We served this with sauteed red chard, which is difficult to see in the background of the picture. The chard is from the garden, and I sacrificed it to make room for a volunteer tomato plant.