Bleat, or ble.at, is a brand new, ambitious database and social networking site for veg*ans. The site launched just a few days ago and is still in beta, with some glaring bugs, but it seems very promising indeed. The main content areas for now seem to be restaurant and event listings, and recipes. But I gather that things are just getting started and I look forward to seeing what the site will eventually be like.

For now, content is what the site needs. Helsinki had zero entries when I joined (my profile is here), but I’m in the process of adding some content, mainly the few vegan friendly restaurants that we have here (I just added the brand new Helsinki location of Soi Soi). I guess I might also post some of my recipes there.

I realize that this may be of interest only to a small fraction of my readers, but I was excited about the new site, so there you have it! Do consider joining in and contributing if you’re a veg*an.

I’m off to Japan this afternoon so the blog will be even quieter than recently, but I’ll leave you with this delicious tomato-olive seitan roast, with a side of fried onions and broccoli and hazelnut-barley mix. The seitan roast was made from scratch with chopped sun dried tomatoes and green olives, and then baked in the oven for 1,5 hours. I’ve made a couple of variations of seitan roasts. They’re nice because you can experiment a little with the dough: it keeps together much better than with other methods of cooking seitan. However, the crust easily gets a bit hard and you have to use quite a lot of oil. Recently I’ve been favouring a baking method in which I simmer chunks of seitan in broth and bake the whole thing in the oven, which produces a lovely juicy texture. Anyway, hopefully I can return to the topic of food with some photos from Japan!

Tomato-Olive Seitan Roast

..and there were some carrots, barley, and soy mince in it too. Kale is something that you’d think would be popular in Finland, but it’s actually rather difficult to find. It’s a nice addition to the deep greens, which you really can’t have too much. Collard greens would be welcome too, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen them here; a pity!

Giant Bean, Cabbage & Kale Soup