Tag: nutritional yeast

Vegan Cheesy Roasted Cauliflower

If you think you hate cauliflower or know someone who thinks they hate cauliflower, this is the way you need to try it. Actually, any vegetable you think you hate, you might like roasted. In this case, the cauliflower is also coated in seasoned nutritional yeast which makes it particularly tasty.

If you’re locked into going grocery shopping once a week or less, cauliflower, like broccoli, is very forgiving and will hang out and chill in your fridge for at least a week if not longer. When you aren’t sure of your plans day-to-day, these vegetables become your best friends.

cauliflower florets

Vegan Cheesy Roasted Cauliflower

Ingredients

1 head cauliflower
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1/2 tsp garlic powder
1/4 tsp ground black pepper
1/2 tsp salt
2 TBS olive oil

Preheat oven to 400F. Spray a baking sheet with oil.

Cut cauliflower into fairly uniform florets about 1 1/2-2″ long and put them in a bowl with room to stir them around. Chop up the leftover stalk and feed it to your dog if she likes that kind of thing. (mine really does)

Stir together dry ingredients in a small bowl.

nutritional yeast seasoning

 

Drizzle olive oil over florets and stir to coat. Sprinkle dry ingredients over cauliflower and stir to coat. Pour out onto prepared baking sheet.

seasoned cauliflower

 

Bake 10 minutes, then stir around and bake another 10 minutes. Test to see if largest pieces can be pierced with a fork. If so, they’re done. If not, give ’em a few more minutes.

vegan cheesy roasted cauliflower

Do you roast vegetables? What’s your favorite?

The best vegan Parmesan

“Being vegan is so expensive!”

We’ve all heard that one, right? And it’s easy to see how people might think that. If you look on the store shelves at straight vegan substitutes, the price differential can be alarming.

Let’s look at Parmesan cheese. Many of us probably grew up with the familiar green shaker container of Parmesan that came out every time you had something in an Italian red sauce for dinner. This stuff is pretty cheap due to subsidies, factory farming etc.

conventional parmesan cheese

Now, if you just grab a straight vegan substitute off the shelf, it’ll be about three times the price of the conventional version. Ouch.

vegan parmesan parma

Yellow Rose Recipes by Joanna VaughtBut guess what? You can make your own vegan Parmesan! If you search online, you’ll find a number of recipes, but Joanna Vaught‘s from Yellow Rose Recipes is my absolute favorite. Unlike some of the other vegan Parmesan recipes, Joanna’s includes walnuts which give you Omega-3 fatty acids.

Speaking of Joanna and Yellow Rose Recipes, keep an eye on her website. If you weren’t lucky enough to get a copy of Yellow Rose Recipes before it went out of print, she’ll be posting all the recipes on her site! The Butternut Squash Lasagna will impress the most skeptical omnivores. Make extra spice mixture in her Cajun Spiced Tofu recipe to keep on hand so you can bust that tofu out even faster. And make “chicken” and waffles with her Crispy Beer-Battered Seitan. Oh man.

Joanna kindly gave me permission to post her Vegan Parmesan recipe here for Vegan Mofo. I always have a shaker in my fridge and have been known to use it on Mexican food.

To save even more money on ingredients, shop in the bulk bins. If you can find broken cashew pieces, those are often cheaper than whole ones.

Vegan Parmesan

vegan parmesan

by Joanna Vaught published in Yellow Rose Recipes

Makes 2 cups, or exactly 1 used 5 oz. nutritional yeast jar full (reduce, reuse, recycle!)

vegan parmesan in shaker jarIngredients

1/2 cup walnuts
1/2 cup raw cashews
1/2 cup brown rice flour (I’ve substituted other flours like whole wheat when I’ve been out. Still works great.)
1/2 cup nutritional yeast
1 TBS garlic powder
2 tsp salt

Combine all ingredients in food processor and process until fine crumbs. Will last up to a month in an airtight container in your fridge.

 

Baked pasta & cheese, Tex-Mex style

After making a pot of chili, I flipped back a few pages of The Happy Herbivore to the Baked Shells and Cheese recipe. One of the variation was to add a can of chili and make it a chili mac. So I just added a cup and a half or so of the chili to it. I’ve always been a fan of nutritional yeast cheezy sauces, but I don’t think I’ve ever made one that uses silken tofu in it. It made the sauce really creamy. Very nice. Apparently it’s like glue on plates though. My dishwasher wouldn’t get it off. I had to hand wash some of those dishes. The top is sprinkled with bread crumbs and a little Daiya.

Meanwhile, there was still chili leftover. It went on to become lunches and top grilled hot dogs. I really stretched that one out!

Pasta in cheezy sauce

Dinner in a flash seems to be a recurring theme around here. If it’s not so flashy that I’m having someone else cook it, it’s often something that takes little fiddling. Bonus if it’s something that I can keep around for a quick meal without worrying about it going bad.

Enter the easy vegan cheese sauce mix. Your Vegan Mom posted the recipe a while back and ever since I first whipped it up I try to keep some around. I always keep frozen peas and pasta of some sort in the house. And I always have soy milk. So half a cup of the mix, plus one cup of milk equals sauce. If you’re feeling fancy, add soy curls, tofu, chopped up seitan log, whatever. Here instead of the peas, we had spinach on the side and I tossed in some tofu leftovers I had. Really you can just dump whatever you like in it. I only wish I had a vitamix to get the mix more powdery. I think the sauce would come out smoother.