Recipe of the Month: Soy Curl Fajitas

For quite a few years now, I've been the only vegetarian (or, to be more precise, conscientious omnivore) in my extended family. This makes for a bit of trouble at holiday gatherings. I always tell my relatives I can just eat everything but the meat in whatever they're having, but they usually make a little extra effort to accommodate me. If they're not serving an Amy-friendly dinner like fish or pasta, they add a veggie version of the main dish to the menu, such as a separate veggie pizza alongside the pepperoni pizza the rest of the family is eating. I always tell the relatives they're welcome to some of "my" veggie selection, but most of the time, no one takes me up on it.

This year, one of the family dinners was fajitas. We've had this meal as part of our Christmas gathering before, but usually, they just cook the meat and the vegetables separately so I can have veggie fajitas while the rest of the family has meat. But this year, Brian had brought some Soy Curls with him, planning to cook them up Chinese style for a Jewish-Christmas dinner on Christmas Day after most of the relatives had gone home. So he decided to soak and cook a few of them along with the veggies and serve them to me for my own vegan fajitas.

As it turns out, Soy Curls work extremely well for this application. They're about the size the meat strips in a fajita would normally be anyway, and their chewy texture is pretty much indistinguishable from the real thing. As for the flavor, I think even a dedicated carnivore would have had a hard time telling them from meat under all the layers of seasoning added to them. 

If you'd like to try fajitas this way yourself, the process is pretty straightforward:

1. Soak the Soy Curls in vegetable broth. Brian used our trusty Penzey's Vegetable Stock.
2. Fry them in oil until they're slightly browned.
3. Add sliced bell peppers and onions to the pan and cook until the veggies are softened.
4. Add your favorite Mexican seasonings. Brian used a sprinkle of Penzey's Fajita Seasoning and a dash of Ortega Taco Sauce, the same flavorings that went into the chicken fajitas the rest of the family was having.
5. Serve them up with warm flour tortillas and toppings of your choice: sour cream, guacamole, salsa, chopped tomato, lettuce, or all of the above.

I couldn't persuade any of Brian's relatives to try these meatless fajitas, but Brian sampled a bit himself, and we both deemed them an unqualified success. And, as luck would have it, one of our Christmas gifts this year was a Penzey's gift card. So we picked up a little jar of the Penzey's Fajita Seasoning along with a couple more containers of the veggie stock, with an eye toward making these Soy Curl fajitas a regular part of our dinner repertoire.