Soy-free Vegan Creamy Pasta Recipe

I want to share this new recipe that I've come up with and am quite proud of. It is delicious and super healthy - overflowing with vegetables. Oh and it's super easy to make too. I adapted it from this vegan alfredo recipe that I've been using for years. Since I'm cutting back on our soy consumption recently I wanted to try to make this recipe soy free. It tastes just as good as ever and now contains more veg! Makes a generous amount of sauce for one box of pasta.

Ingredients

Sauce

1 1/2 cups cashews or almonds or a mix soaked in water for 4 hours or more

1 1/2 - 2 cups chopped cauliflower, steamed till soft

2 cloves garlic

1 cup almond milk

4 TBSP olive oil

1 tsp lemon juice

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/4 tsp pepper

1/2 tsp salt

~375 g of pasta

optional

~1 lb mushrooms, chopped

a bunch of chopped spinach, fresh or frozen

Directions

Start sautéing the mushrooms in a large pan and cooking the spinach and cooking the pasta. While they're going make the sauce:

Drain the nuts. Place all sauce ingredients in a blender and blend well. When the mushrooms are done add the sauce and the spinach to the pan, mix and heat. You really just want to heat the sauce to warm. But heating it also mellows the raw garlic taste so you can heat for longer and taste as you go.

Since you don't really taste the spinach in it too much I like to serve it with another green such as steamed broccoli or asparagus on the side. It is also good with a side salad of course.

It is so good even Henry likes it usually. Just not this night for some reason. Actually I think this was because he wasn't in the mood for getting his hands dirty and he couldn't get his fork working. The next day he was a pro with the fork and ate lots of leftover pasta.

Some Food Experiments

I did a few food experiments recently. Well I followed recipes so nothing super experimental. Here are my results.

I finally got around to making my own almond milk. It was super easy and pretty tasty. It has a lot more taste than the store bought stuff - a marzipan taste. I quickly got used to the taste though and think I could get into the hang of making it on an at least semi-regular basis.

I also tried making some cashew yogurt using this recipe. I did add a little probiotic powder since I had it even though the recipe didn't call for it. It turned out a lovely consistency and you can see from the picture with my maple syrup mixed in I was so ready to love it but I didn't like it at all, couldn't even eat that bowl. Too much cashew taste, it also had a bit of a fizz on my tongue which I've gotten in bad batches of my soy yogurt before. I am trying to eat a little less soy so there may be some more experiments like this coming up.

And to keep things interesting, here are some pictures of Henry on a fall hike we did last week.

Vegan Cream Soup

I tried a new recipe today for leek and potato soup. It was in our local paper and it uses cashew cream. I've enjoyed cashew cream with vegan desserts before but never thought of doing this. Before I would just add soy milk in place of the cream and the soups have been good but never as good as this. This soup turned out really creamy.

I just put 1 cup of raw cashews in water overnight (in the refrigerator) and today I rinsed the cashews, blended them up with just enough water and then added it to the soup - I need to try some more cream soup recipes now. It was filling too!