Celebrating Five Years of Knowing my Wife with No Repeat Dinners: Five-Spice Jerk Tempeh Five-(y)Ears of Corn

Today was the fifth anniversary of meeting my wife and is now the beginning of the sixth year of unique dinners I've prepared for her - no repeats in five years! I dropped a lot of hints in the meal I made, but my wife missed it :-) !

I prepared a serving of mixed brown and wild rice, cooked in water and a vegan bouilloun cube as I usually do. I served that as the centerpiece then wanted to put five pieces of seitan with five spices down.

I was going to use Chinese five-spice powder, but one of the spices is cinnamon, which my wife doesn't like. Instead, I decided to make up my own blend of five spices. When I started investigating my spice cabinet, I realized that the jerk seasoning that I have has five spices! So I used it.

I sauteed large spears of seitan, perhaps, roughly, 2 1/2" long by 3/4" thick and wide, over medium heat. As the seitan was reasonably brown, after about 8-10 minutes or so, I added 2/3 of a red bell pepper, cut into 1/4" cubes, as well as pieces of four or five roasted garlic cloves, and cooked for another 3 minutes or so.

I dragged each piece of seitan through the jerk seasoning and served five pieces over the rice. Id included an edible pun - five (y)ears of baby corn! I also included five slices of tomato and five dollops of guacamole in my atypically symmetric presentation, that was made complete with fresh rose petals from my organic garden.

The meal surpassed my expectations! I had been using a salt-free jerk seasoning, but this time had a bottle with salt included. Though I don't use much salt in my cooking, it goes great with jerk seasoning and I loved the seitan!