Cold Udon Noodles with Peanut Sauce and Seitan

I'm a huge fan of Isa Chandra Moskowitz, America's Most Awesome Vegan Chef. She has a rad website and has written several books. I own Vegan with a Vengeance, and tonight I made this delicious cold noodle dish from it. It's got lots of raw vegetables and the peanut sauce is so good I could eat it with a spoon. I will now paraphrase the recipe below.

Ingredients

Peanut Sauce:
2 t peanut oil
2 cloves minced garlic
2 T minced ginger
1 C water
2 T soy sauce
1 t ground coriander
2/3 C creamy natural peanut butter
2 T maple syrup
3 T rice vinegar
2 t chile sauce (I used Sriracha)

Seitan:
1 lb seitan sliced into 1/4" strips
1 T peanut oil
1 clove garlic
2 t soy sauce

To Serve:
10 oz udon noodles
1/4 C black sesame seeds
1 cucumber, halved across, sliced into matchsticks (I'm not too dexterous with a  knife, so mine were more like crudité.)
4 C mung bean sprouts
1 red bell pepper, thinly sliced
2 C scallions, chopped
Lime wedges

Method:

Make the peanut sauce:
In a small saucepan, sauté the garlic and ginger in peanut oil over low-medium heat. Add the water, soy sauce, and coriander and bring to a boil. Add the peanut butter and turn heat to low. Whisk until well combined. Mix in the maple syrup, vinegar, and chile sauce. Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.

Make the noodles:
Meanwhile, prepare the udon noodles according to package directions. When noodles have cooked, drain in a colander and rinse with cold water until they are cool to the touch. Let them rest in the colander while you prepare the seitan.

Make the seitan:
Sauté the seitan in peanut oil for 5 minutes on each side until browned. Then add the garlic and soy sauce and cook for another minute or so.

The peanut sauce should now be at room temperature. Give the noodles a final rinse to make them cold and keep them from sticking together.

In the actual recipe, it is recommended to plate everything before serving on a big platter, which you could totally do, but a great thing about this dish is that it's fun to serve buffet style, so that everyone gets the perfect proportion of noodles to sauce to veggies to seitan. By the way, I hadn't had seitan before this meal. I liked it, but I think it expanded a lot in my stomach and did make me feel uncomfortable for a while afterwards!