Creamy Vegan Mac & Cheese – VeganMoFo Day 9

We’re onto week 2 of VeganMoFo 2018! This week is about Dietary Restrictions…which sounds slightly boring but isn’t actually, it’s a good challenge to think about things people can and can’t eat and learn to cook for them. After all, we’re vegans and there are things we can’t eat – shouldn’t we try to be inclusive too?

Today’s prompt is “creamy without nuts”  – a lot of vegan cream/cheese is cashew based, making it unsuitable for those with nut allergies. But there’s an easy way around that – tofu! Using tofu as a cream base is a little old school, but I based it off my gooey cheese sauce which is honestly really good, and has no nuts!

Of course, if you’re cooking for someone with allergies you must be very diligent about what ingredients you use. This recipe has breadcrumbs in – make sure your breadcrumbs are nut free. It’s always better to err on the side of caution when it comes to allergies.

I make up the sauce for this pasta, combine it with cooked pasta, top with breadcrumbs and bake in the oven for a crispy topping. It’s so creamy and moreish!

You could use whatever pasta you want for this – shells would work well – but I used macaroni for the pictures!

 

Creamy Mac & Cheese

• Servings: 2-4
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Ingredients

• 250g macaroni pasta, cooked
• 100g breadcrumbs
• 350g silken tofu
• 500ml vegetable stock
• 2 tbsp sunflower oil
• 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 3 cloves garlic, finely minced
• 40g cornstarch
• 1 tsp salt

Directions

Preheat the oven to 180C/355F
1. Heat the oil in a large saucepan, and add the minced garlic, cook until beginning to brown (keep an eye on it as it turns quickly!).
2. Remove from the heat, and add the tofu, nutritional yeast, salt, cornstarch, and vegetable stock.
3. Using a stick blender (or transfer to a stand blender) blend the mixture until smooth.
4. Return the saucepan to a low heat, and whisk continually until the mixture has thickened.
5. Once thickened, continue to whisk for a further minute, before removing from the heat.
6. Mix in the cooked pasta, and pour into a baking dish.
7. Top with the breadcrumbs, and place in the preheated oven for 20 minutes, until browning on top.
8. Serve and enjoy!

Bolognese Fries – VeganMoFo Day 27

Day 27 of VeganMoFo already, wow! Today is about feeding the “young (at heart)” – which really could mean many things! I decided to go for a meal that would make a kid’s heart sing – it’s tasty, a little messy, and contains both chips and cheese!

This is a recipe for “bolognese fries” – or chips, if you prefer. Even better – the chips are homemade, and oil free too! To be honest, I usually make my chips the usual way with oil, but I found out that you can make them without oil quite easily (you just chop them up and pop them in the oven!) and that way works really well for this recipe, they aren’t as heavy tasting with all the bolognese and cheese on top too.

For the cheese on top, I used Tesco’s free from grated mozzarella. It’s a version of Sheese, if you can get that. It melts really well, as you can see. A cheese that melts is something you want for this dish, as it adds a nice creamy element!

I also used Tesco’s frozen vegan mince (I promise I’m not a Tesco ad!) for the bolognese but you could use whatever you have handy, or even rehydrated TVP if that’s all you have access to.

Bolognese Fries

• Servings: 3-4
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Ingredients

• 800g potatoes, cut into chips
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 cloves garlic, chopped
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp dried oregano
• 1 tsp dried basil
• 1 tsp dried rosemary
• 1 tsp marmite
• 1 tbsp tomato puree
• 250g frozen mince
• 1 can chopped tomatoes
• 1/2 cup water
• Grated cheese to top

Directions

Preheat your oven to 200C/400F
1. Place your potato chips on a baking tray in one layer (you may need two trays for this). Sprinkle generously with salt and pepper, and place in your preheated oven for 35 minutes, until golden. Leave the oven on afterwards!
2. Meanwhile, make the bolognese sauce. In a large frying pan, fry the onion and garlic in the oil until softened.
3. Add the oregano, basil, and rosemary, and fry for thirty seconds.
4. Add the remaining bolognese ingredients (everything else except the cheese) and simmer for 10-15 minutes. Taste and season.
5. Once the chips and bolognese are done, place the chips in a roasting tin.
6. Top the chips with the bolognese sauce, and then generously grate cheese on top.
7. Place the roasting tin in the still hot oven for 5-10 minutes, until the cheese melts.
8. Serve immediately.

 

Cheesy Sausage Rolls – VeganMoFo Day 6

Cheese! Second to “but I could never give up bacon”, cheese is given as the main reason people won’t go vegan (not a scientific fact, but near enough). I’ve heard plenty of times “I would go vegan, but…. cheese”. I’ve never quite understood why not being able to give up cheese means you have to eat all the other animal products too, but that’s a different story. The upshot is, not being able to have cheese is pretty difficult for new vegans.

Thankfully, things have been changing in the vegan cheese world. Ten years ago, vegan cheese was not so good. It didn’t melt, it just sat there and got warm, and tasted slightly of old socks. Nutritional yeast, lovely as it is, didn’t quite fit that cheese craving. These days, most supermarkets in the UK sell vegan cheese – Violife is the main one, which I’ve used in this recipe, but Tesco and Sainsbury’s both have their own brand!

So, to showcase what vegan cheese can do, I decided to make cheesy sausage rolls. These were inspired by sausage rolls you can get at Sneinton Vegan Market, a monthly vegan market in Nottingham near me. I thought I’d have a go at making my own. I served them of course with mushy peas!

To fill these sausage rolls, I used granose sausage mix, which I bought from Morrisons, but you could use any sausage mix or vegan sausages themselves, just cut them to fit. I used jus-rol puff pastry as it’s vegan and cut it into six pieces.

Vegan Cheesy Sausage Rolls

• Servings: makes 6
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Ingredients

• 1 packet sausage mix, made up as directed
• 1 puff pastry sheet, cut into six rectangles, as pictured above
• 1 packet vegan cheese, sliced
• olive oil for brushing

Directions

Preheat the oven to 200C/400F
1. Get a rectangle of the puff pastry, and place it on your baking sheet.
2. Top with a spoonful of the sausage mix, spread so you can easily fold the puff pastry over.
3. Place a slice of cheese on top of the sausage mix.
4. Fold the puff pastry over the filling, and using a little water, seal tight (see photos above).
5. Repeat until all the pastry is used up.
6. Brush the unbaked sausage rolls with a little olive oil, then place them in the preheated oven.
7. Cook for 25-30 minutes, until golden brown.

 

Creamy Tofu “Cheese” – VeganMoFo Day 25

My first vegan meal…well, I have no idea. I was brought up vegetarian and sort of stumbled into veganism, becoming dairy intolerant first and then realising there was no good reason to not be fully vegan. So I never had a “first vegan meal” – probably a lot of the meals I ate growing up were vegan anyway.

But an early memory of vegan food I have is cheese. When I stopped eating dairy, I thought that was it, I’d never be able to eat cheese again. However, I realised you could get vegan cheese. Wow! Dairy free cheese, what a winner! So I bought some. And tried it. And promptly spat it out. Yuck! Vegan cheese has not always been the violife/chao/etc that we have now.

Don’t worry, I am not going to recreate nasty cheese for this blog. What I am going to make is a nice, mild and creamy cheese that goes really well on pasta, soup, bread…all sorts of applications. In fact, it’s the cheese I used a few days ago on top of my spinach risotto!

And it’s really quite simple to make. Just tofu, blended together with nutritional yeast, vegetable stock powder, onion and garlic powder, lemon juice, olive oil, and a tiny amount of vinegar.

You then tie it in cheesecloth, or a tea-towel, and leave it to drain over a bowl overnight. This firms the cheese up and lets it hold its shape.

I then like to bake the cheese, which firms it up even more and gives a nice crust, but you could use it as a cream cheese just as it is!

 

This cheese recipe is SO versatile. You can adapt it however you want. Add herbs to make a herby boursin like cheese. Add chillis and smoked paprika for a Mexican style cheese. Add olives if you like! Or just have it as it is.

Creamy Tofu Cheese

• Servings: 1 cheese block
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Ingredients

• 300g tofu, drained
• 1 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 1/2 tsp vegetable bouillon powder
• 1/2 tsp onion powder
• 1/2 tsp garlic powder
• 1 tbsp olive oil
• 3 tbsp lemon juice
• 1/2 tsp cider vinegar
• 1 tsp salt

Directions

1. Place all the ingredients in the bowl of a food processor and blend. Scrape down the sides and blend again, until a smooth mixture is formed.
2. Pour the mixture onto a cheesecloth or (clean) tea towel. Pull the ends together to form a little parcel, and place in a sieve over a bowl.
3. Leave in the fridge overnight to drain.
4. Next, remove the cheese from the cloth. It should be much firmer now!
5. You can either have the cheese as it is, or bake it.
6. If you wish to bake it, heat your oven to 175C/350F and bake the cheese for 40 minutes. Cool before eating!

Cheese and Onion Pasties – VeganMoFo Day 23

Today in VeganMoFo we’re challenged to show what seasonal food we make. It’s well and truly autumn/winter here, this week has been cold and rainy and really quite horrible. Seasonal vegetables – such as butternut squash, beetroot, swede – are all very well but sometimes you just want some cosy food.

Enter, pasties! Crisp pastry wrapped around a warm, melt in your mouth filling. What could be better?

Look, I even served it with vegetables (broad beans and peas) so it’s healthy! Perfect kinda meal, right?

This pasty has the best kind of filling: cheese and onion! This was my husband’s request, as he used to enjoy the cheese and onion pasties you could get before he was vegan. I thought I’d see if I could make it vegan and – I could, easily. I used Violife cheese, but use whatever you like, just make sure it is a cheese that actually melts!

The first step is to fry the onions and potatoes. The potatoes are diced very small, so they cook slightly in the pan and then can finish cooking completely in the pasties. If they’re cut too large, they won’t cook through.

Then, once cooled, the potato onion mixture goes in a bowl with the grated cheese and seasoning. I used a food processor attachment to grate my cheese because I find it annoying grating so much by hand, but it can be done by hand if you don’t have a food processor.

Next, the pastry gets rolled out and filled with the potato-onion-cheese mixture. Make this generous as the pastry will puff up and you don’t want an empty pasty!

Finally, the pasties are baked in the oven for thirty minutes until lovely and golden brown! You can serve them how you like – on their own, with vegetables, in your packed lunch…however. Hot or cold, they’re lovely comfort food.

Cheese and Onion Pasties

• Servings: 6 pasties
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Ingredients

• 1 tbsp vegan butter
• 1 large onion, diced
• 325g potatoes, peeled and diced small (1cm cubes roughly)
• 150g vegan cheese (I used Violife), grated
• Salt & Pepper
• 450g puff pastry
• 2 tbsp vegan butter, melted (for brushing on top of the pasties)

Directions

1. Melt the tablespoon of vegan butter in a large pan.
2. Add the onion and fry for 5 minutes until the onion is translucent.
3. Add the potato cubes and a slosh of water and fry for a further 5 minutes, adding more water if it starts to stick to the bottom.
4. Remove from the heat, place in a large bowl, and leave to cool.
Preheat your oven to 180C/355F
5. Once cool, mix in the grated cheese and the seasonings.
6. Next, roll out your puff pastry. Cut it into small rectangles – about A5 size – place on a baking tray, and place a big scoop of the potato filling on top of half of your rectangles.
7. Top the pasties with the other half of the rolled out pastry. Seal the sides by brushing with a little water and squishing together with the tines of a fork. Push the fork into the top of the pastry to create a hole to allow steam to escape.
8. Brush the pasties with the melted butter – this gives them a lovely golden colour once cooked.
9. Bake in your preheated oven for 30 minutes, or until golden brown and crispy.
10. Can be eaten hot or cold.

Gooey Cheese Sauce

Mmm, pizza. Who doesn’t love it, with its gooey, stretchy cheese topping? Or lasagne, with the cheesy layer next to the pasta and the tomato sauce?  As vegans, sometimes we think we have to miss out on that. But we don’t!

I found this recipe a while ago on Season Square, a French vegan blog, and adapted it (and translated it!) to make this lovely cheese sauce, which goes great in anything you could use cheese sauce for – on pizza, it hardens up a little and forms a gooey topping, in lasagne, using it instead of the bechamel, in sandwiches…the possibilities are endless!

It’s so simple too – you just blend all the ingredients together, and heat gently, till the sauce thickens and you can then use it however you like.

• Servings: Enough to cover 2 pizzas
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Ingredients

• 350g silken tofu
• 110ml vegetable stock
• 2 tbsp sunflower oil
• 2 tbsp nutritional yeast
• 3 cloves garlic, finely minced
• 40g cornstarch
• 1 tsp salt

Directions

1. In a large saucepan, fry the minced garlic in the oil for about a minute – don’t let it burn!
2. Remove from the heat, and add the tofu, vegetable stock, salt, cornstarch and nutritional yeast.
3. Using a stick blender (or transfer to a stand blender) blend the mixture until smooth.
4. Return the saucepan to a low heat, and whisk continually until the mixture has thickened.
5. Once thickened, continue to whisk for a further minute, before removing from the heat.
6. Use however you like!

Thank you to Season Square for the recipe inspo!

Tomato, Basil, Garlic & (almond) Feta Pasta: Vegan MoFo Day 2!

The theme for day two of Vegan MoFo 2015 is: A Dish from Your Childhood.

This dish is one I remember eating in summer holidays at my Aunt’s house in France. Light and summery, it makes the most of good fresh ingredients and requires little cooking. Of course, the original wasn’t vegan because of the feta – but I found a wonderful recipe on the Maple Spice Blog for a “Baked Almond Feta”. Most nut “cheeses” I have seen are not really doable for me, because they need you to blend whole nuts and, well, my blender just isn’t up to that. This one, however, uses preground almonds you buy in packs (Almond Flour for you foreigners!). You mix it with lemon juice, water, olive oil, garlic, and salt, and then tie it in a funny contraption with either cheesecloth, muslin, or whatever fabric you have to hand, and let it drain overnight in the fridge.

You then turn it out into a dish and bake for 40 minutes or so until it dries out and, let it cool (if you can) and you have a wonderful “Feta” cheese! It’s not as solid as some feta can be – if you want a super solid feta try some of the tofu feta recipes bumbling about the net, but it’s creamy and salty and tangy, just like feta should be!

The finished feta, crumbled a little.

For the pasta recipe, I use cherry tomatoes, fresh basil, chopped garlic, and olive oil. Mix it all in a bowl and let marinate for at least half an hour. Resist the urge to eat it with a spoon.

Once it’s done marinating, just cook the pasta, add to the mixture, plate up and crumble the feta on top. Delicious!

Tomato, Basil, Garlic & Feta Pasta

• Servings: 2
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Ingredients

• 1 batch Almond Feta (or vegan feta of your choice)
• 180g pasta
• 350g cherry tomatoes, chopped
• 1 large handful fresh basil, chopped,
• 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped,
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• Salt & Pepper for seasoning

Directions

1. Put the tomatoes, basil, garlic, and olive oil in a bowl, and mix well.
2. Leave to marinate for at least 30 minutes (if longer, keep in the fridge).
3. Cook the pasta until done, and add to the mixture.
4. Season with salt and pepper, and spoon onto plates.
5. Crumble the feta over the pasta and serve.