Seitan Satay Salad

This is a nice twist on the "Wheat Meat Satays with Spicy Peanut Sauce" in "Vegetarian Meat and Potatoes."

The satay looked awesome all by itself, but looking at the recipe reminded me of the times when Optimistic and her law school friends and I would eat at Vietnam restaurant in Philly. They would serve satay (or tofu, or spring rolls, etc) in a bowl with the grilled greasy stuff on top, disguising a mound of that awesome carrot and daikon pickle, and a lot of raw veggies, with warm, starchy rice noodles underneath. So I wanted something like that, and being 2000 or so miles from Philly made it hard to get stuff from Vietnam. But we are intrepid food explorers! We could make do!

So I made up some rice, and put about 1/2 a cup in the bottom of a bowl, and over it, I spooned about a tablespoon of the marinade from the Satay recipe. Then I topped that with the following salad:

1/2 cucumber, diced,
1 Large carrot, diced
1T diced red onion (sure doing a lot of dicing!)
Wedges from 2 or three peeled mandarins
10-15 basil leaves
6 to 10 mint leaves
butter lettuce, chopped.

Toss all this with 1T unfiltered sake.

Then I topped that with the Wheat Meat Satay and covered it all with a liberal dash of the Spicy Peanut sauce.

This was so good, and so very reminiscent of the dishes at Vietnam, that I penciled our salad variation into the margins of our copy of VM&P, just in case we get the craving again!