Homemade, Homegrown

Two summers ago, I was all about the homemade. I made bread from scratch every week, started making my own yogurt, etc, etc. That was the height of my make-iness, but I’ve been feeling the urge again. The main goal of whittling down the contents of my pantry, fridge, and freezer has been to get through all the various fake meats and bread-y type products so I can make some of my own. I’ve come a long way in the past few years, as far as making food from scratch goes, and I’d like to stop buying packaged protein sources and so on.
I’ve made quite a dent in what’s in the freezer (I think there’s one Boca patty, some Morningstar burger crumbles, a Trader Joe’s Italian meatless sausage, and just a couple odds and ends left), so today I went ahead and made seitan sausages/brats. I wanted something that could be thrown on the grill, and I knew that this recipe (for the fauxsages, scroll down) had turned out well for me before. I changed the spices — replaced the oregano with chili powder, the basil with cumin, nixed the fennel seeds, and used half a teaspoon garlic powder instead of real garlic cloves (added it before seeing the cloves on the ingredients list!). I also made eight smaller sausages instead of four (steamed them for the same amount of time, though), which seems like a better serving size to me. They’re great!
I thought about trying to make buns, but there was no way I was going to turn the oven on in this heat. Instead, I made tortillas with this recipe. [Link fixed now -- sorry!] Well, I changed that one, too. Instead of two cups AP flour, I used 1c whole wheat bread flour + 1/2 cup AP flour + 1/4 cup spelt flour + 1/4 cup buckwheat flour + 1 Tbsp vital wheat gluten. (I added the gluten because I was worried that the spelt and buckwheat flours might make the tortillas too brittle.) They ALSO turned out really well! I made a wrap with both the sausages and tortillas, and it was top notch. I expected my tortillas to resist the folding and rolling, but they were very supple and even held everything together when I cut the finished wrap in half.

The above was my lunch yesterday — a pressed sandwich with hummus, red peppers, tomato, red cabbage + beet salad, onion, and honey Dijon. The pepper, tomato, cabbage, and beet all came from the garden! It’s been good to me this year.
The sandwich kind of exemplifies the ways I’ve changed with regard to food. Well, first, there’s the fact that I grew so many of the components myself! I was not a gardener growing up (although my mom was), so the fact that I can consistently grow huge tomato plants is sort of a surprise. Well, it has a LOT to do with the garden’s location (sunny!) and the good dirt/humus I’ve brought in.
But even more than that is the fact that I wouldn’t have touched this sandwich five years ago. Honestly, I think the only thing I would have willingly eaten was the bread. Possibly red cabbage, raw and sparse in a lettuce mixture. Thank goodness my palate has matured! I just couldn’t have dealt with the sweet/savory/vinegary combination that this sandwich had. I remember trying to eat a brie and cranberry (or something similar) sandwich about six years ago, and I couldn’t come to terms with it.
These days, I think anise (think black licorice) is the only flavor I’m not on friendly terms with. So I don’t like stuff that’s loaded up with fennel seeds, but I can still enjoy it in a curry. It always seems silly to me when grown men and women pick things out of their meals at restaurants (except excess slices of raw onion — I think we all get a free pass on that one, for our fellow human beings’ sakes). Do you have any foods or ingredients that are just no-can-do for you?