Chicken and Dumpling Soup

I found a recipe for chicken and dumpling soup at cause i eats me spinach the other day that looked so good that I had to make it tonight. I used to eat chicken and dumpling soup a lot as a kid, though I don't really know when I stopped. I feel like I hadn't had it in a long time, even before I went veggie and vegan.

Prepping didn't take to long. Just some garlic, carrots, and kale.

Step one was to brown some faux chicken. Normally, I would make my own, but I was on a bit of a time crunch, so I used some storebought that's been pretty good in the paste. Despite appearances, I didn't brown it enough here; little crumbles of it that were sticking were browning, but the hunks themselves didn't. I should've used more oil and gone at it a few minutes longer, but it still worked out.

To the side, I mixed some flour, baking powder, olive oil, and soymilk in a bowl.

Stirred it all up to get a gloopy, delicious dumpling batter.

Sauteed the garlic and carrots in a bit of olive oil for a few minutes. My friend was also using the oven to make a stirfry, so the first few minutes were filled with oil flying everywhere.

Added flour to the oil and vegetables to make a roux. I haven't done it this way before; I always made the roux before I added other things. It seemed to come out okay, though.

Added the water and 2 bouillon cubes, alongside about a half of a teaspoon of each the recommended spices. I forgot to add the salt, which confused me a bit at the end, but was easy to fix.

Dumped in the kale at this point. It cooked down pretty fast. Meanwhile, my stir-frying friend put in some cabbage here, which took the better part of 20 minutes to cook down.

As the kale cooked down, I dumped in the seitan on top of it, then stirred it all together.

I added the dumplings, oversized-teaspoon-by-oversized-teaspoon.

It looks like I have too much dumpling going on here, but everything floats in this soup.

Ladled out into a bowl. Pretty good. The changes I would make are browning the seitan a bit more, and maybe using EB instead of olive oil, but those aren't big things. J also had a bowl, and despite protests that I gave him "more than enough", ate the whole thing (down to the oh-so-classy drinking the broth*).

I still have about three or four bowls left of it, which I'll probably eat tomorrow. Definitely, this recipe is on my 'make-again' list.

*I also did that