Ruben on Homemade Rye

Apparently most of my recipes are coming from Vegan Dad these days! I find I tend to get fixated with a particular cookbook (or blog in this case) for a while, then move on to a new one. Mostly I've been trying my hand at seitan and he seems to be quite an expert in the matter. I don't know that I've had a real ruben, but I love rye bread and saurkraut, so I figured I couldn't go wrong.

My first step was to acquire rye flour, which resulted in a trip to Planet Organic. Couldn't find it at my normal grocery store. Next up, make the rye bread. I used a recipe entitled George's Light Rye Bread, which comes from this cute elderly man, George. I mostly picked this recipe because of George. I think we can learn a lot about food from the generations before us! George did not disappoint. This bread turned out absolutely amazing. I'm not sure how much difference it made, but I'm glad I splurged for the organic rye flour. The recipe makes two loaves so I've been having rye toast for breakfast. It reminds me of my Papa.

Next step: make the vegan corned beef. I had no juniper berries, so they just weren't used. The corned beef was pretty good, though I wasn't a giant fan of the texture. I still need to practice seitan, I think! While the corned beef was steaming I tried my hand at vegan mayo, but I used a terrible recipe that didn't thicken. It had soy milk and I think my next try will have tofu instead. But since I mostly wanted it to make thousand island dressing, it wasn't the end of the world. I just changed the entire batch into thousand island dressing which I can now put on salads. I'm not sure how long it will stay good though... we'll see. The saurkraut was store bought, unfortunately. My Aunt makes great saurkraut but we've long used up the jars she canned for us. We have half a head of saured cabbage thawing in the fridge, though, and Mom has agreed to teach me how to cook holupci, the tiny cabbage rolls I remember my Baba making. Yum.

All around, the sandwich was quite good. I went back for a second. The rest of the family had left over turkey on their rye, so I froze the rest of the corned beef for later uses. I had my sandwich with a cabbage and chickpea salad with tahini lemon dressing and the rest of the har gao from dim sum.