Wild Rice Salad and a Lentil-Seitan roast

I'm back from spending Thanksgiving back home - hope those of you who celebrate Thanksgiving had a good one, as it can be a challenging holiday for vegans. My contribution to the family meal was this salad, adapted from a recipe in the current Vegetarian Times. I liked the variety of flavors, with wild rice, dried cranberries, maple syrup, pine nuts, and mint leaves.

Here's the latest iteration of the baked seitan sausage that stormed the vegan blogs way back when. I hadn't made this for quite a while, and wanted to come up with something that modified the texture of seitan - which I'll admit to finding a little rubbery sometimes. I've had amazing seitan made by others, but the texture often doesn't quite work when I make it. My idea was to add cooked lentils, and the results are pretty good - I wish I'd paid more attention to the ingredient quantities as I was making this. Cooked lentils, raw onion and garlic, and wheat gluten flour are ground finely in the food processor, with lots of spices and sesame and mustard seeds. Guessing, I think I used about a cup of lentils and 3/4 cup of flour, and just enough water to form it into a firm roast. It was wrapped in foil and baked for about 45 minutes at 350 F. It is firm, but tender to cut and eat, with a texture similar to Tofurkey brats and sausages.