Editor's note: The recipe and introductory text below are excerpted from Crescent Dragonwagon's book Passionate Vegetarian. Dragonwagon also shared some helpful cooking tips exclusively with Epicurious, which we've added at the bottom of the page.
This is fast and seriously good. Weird as it sounds, try it once and you'll come back to it. Children are thrilled with it too. It's virtually instant to put together, but it does need to simmer for 15 minutes. If you get really crunched, forgo sautéing the onion.
Now to the recipe's provenance. I'll bet my Aunt Gloria—my father's sister—is going to be astonished that I still have the recipe for the meatballs with the totally bizarre but inexplicably delicious cranberry-and-tomato sauce that she gave me back in 1969, and that that self-same recipe has been converted, to surface again almost 30 years later with seitan. You end up with a sweet-sour sauce, given attitude by the horseradish. It's still a wildly improbable combination, still easy, still infinitely better than it has any right to be.
Serve over pasta or any cooked grain or with mashed potatoes.
• If you don't have time to make your own vegetable stock, Dragonwagon recommends the dark vegetable stock by Kitchen Basics. Packaged or homemade, these stocks are certainly healthier than meat stocks, but as Dragonwagon notes in Passionate Vegetarian, a high-quality vegetable stock does not sacrifice flavor: "It is good stock that underpins the glossy, piquant, sweet, or hot sauces that transform tofu, tempeh, and seitan from plain basics to genuinely satisfying dishes that speak cogently of abundance, not deprivation or blandness for the sake of health."
• Seitan is a traditional Chinese product that's made by separating the wheat gluten (the part containing protein) from flour. It has a meatlike texture and is used to make the "fake meat" dishes served in vegetarian Chinese restaurants. Seitan is sold in the refrigerated section at natural food stores, Asian markets, and some supermarkets.
