Aaaat llaasst....my lo-o-o-ve has come along...
...my lonely days are over....
and life is like a song...
Got home from work and there was this plain white envelope in the mailbox. I looked for a return address--meant nothing to me. 'Oh, please let this be it,' I said out loud. And it was!
My citizenship ceremony invitation has arrived! So tomorrow I call Warwickshire County Council Citizenship Ceremony Officer and find out what to do next!
After doing the happy dance and reading it over several times to make sure everything was okay, I called and left a message on the WCC answer machine and got in the kitchen and made seitan pepperoni (Fat Free Vegan--great blog!) put that in the oven and worked out to Jari Love's Get Ripped to the Core while it baked. It is now cooling on the kitchen counter.
Some people say, if you want pepperoni, why not just eat pepperoni. Why bother making fake pepperoni. If you're vegan be vegan and stop trying to recreate meat. Well, my answer is I'm not trying to recreate meat. Of course I could eat it, but I don't want to. At this point, the thought of animal flesh makes me sick. But that doesn't mean that I don't enjoy a variety of textures and that I don't like the flavors of fennel seeds, chili flakes and smoky paprika. It doesn't taste like meat--vegans don't want it to taste like meat. If it tasted too much like meat, it would make us sick. In fact, some vegans (particularly those who were raised vegans and never learned that chewiness was a desireable quality in food) are repulsed by wheat gluten products because they are too meatlike. But those of us who grew up eating meat do sometimes miss a chewy texture, and wheat gluten is an excellent source of protein. One-half cup of seitan delivers 26 grams of protein, 160 calories, 2 grams of fat, 3.6 mg of iron and 0 grams of cholesterol.
So anyway, that's why the vegan pepperoni.
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Update: I made pizza with a bit of the vegan pepperoni, red bell pepper, mushroom, onion and a jar of my beloved Sacla tomato and roast vegetables pasta sauce. Topped with nutritional yeast flakes, it was very nice. Next time I make the pepperoni, I will go heavier on the black pepper and red pepper flakes. I was afraid of getting it too hot, but the bites I got that had pepper in were nicer than the milder bites. DH and I had half a pizza each and were full. That's interesting, because when I make straight veggie pizzas, we each eat an entire pizza. I guess seitan makes it more filling!