Sunday, June 27

{ pretending to be vegan }

I follow a few health/fitness type blogs, and one of the girls is a straight up vegan. No messing around. She often posts recipes of the vegan-nature, and they always sound fantastic, so I went for one last night. I even picked up the main ingredients at Whole Foods to really kick off the cruelty-free celebration.  :)

Side note: I'm not a vegan, nor am I a vegetarian...nor do I think I could ever successfully become either of those options. When I told my mom about my cooking ventures last night her response was, "Oh please don't tell me you're turning vegan on us. You know your sister will hate you." But I do have a lot of respect for the veg's out there and completely back/envy their self-discipline. 

I was originally inspired by this recipe featuring 'garlic scape pesto' until I found out that not even Whole Foods is vegged out enough to carry garlic scapes. :( 
Not to fear...kitchen improv is here. And here I attempt to 'make it work.'

Spinach being the #1 green ingredient I needed to get rid of (that was somewhat related to pesto)...was thrown into the beloved Magic Bullet first. 

Some garlic, salt, pepper, "Better Than Cream Cheese" (which is made of tofu), Italian seasoning, lemon juice and Parmesan cheese were also added.

WAIT. Vegans don't do cheese, you say? Of course not. That would be too easy. So I looked up how to virtually create Parmesan cheese in a way that would make even Portia de Rossi beg for spaghetti. Or pesto. Combine toasted sesame seeds, nutritional yeast (yah, that one was new to me too), and a dash of salt in a food processor and you'll get something that bizarrely resembles the same consistency as crumbled Parmesan. Minus the cheese part. And it tasted pretty dang good too. 
 nutritional yeast

 oh the joys of cooking alone

toasting the sesames

Blend it ALL together and you get a lovely green mixture...aka vegan pesto.


I needed some more zing, so I sautéed some red onion slivers to add to the green monster. 

awwwwww


And in the end, I realized that I've never been too keen on pesto. Not even the normal kind. So I had to add some red in there, hence the generous topping of diced tomatoes. Rounded out the vegan taste experience to perfection. 

Minor disclaimer: While some of the ingredients I used were definitely not bona fide vegan ingredients, PETA hasn't knocked at my door yet. That's the beauty of not really being vegan...fake it 'til you make it.

~all photos by me.

1 comments:

Dionne said...

Yumminess!

I am not a vegan of veggo, but I do notice that because they don't use meat, they add so much delish flavor to their recipes. Yumminess!

And you won the giveaway on my blog! Yay! Can you please email me your mailing info to spotty_zebra@hotmail.com ? Thanks!

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