Fettucine with (vegan) White Pesto

Oh my, this is my 300th post!

One of my pet peeves about special diet (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, sugar-free, whatever) cooking is the convention of naming a recipe after a foodstuff that it kinda sorta resembles if you pinch your nose and squint real hard while you eat (e.g. Mock Sausage, Sugar-Free Caramel, Scrambled You-Won't-Believe-They-Aren't-Eggs, and all those plant-based "cheeze" sauces out there).

C'mon (vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, sugar-free, whatever) folks...you know these are tasty recipes that stand on their own without trying to stand on the shoulders of a "missing" ingredient.  The practice reeks of an inferiority complex and besides, you're inevitably setting your dining companions up for failed expectations if you tell them you will be serving something like is *almost* like sausage/cheese/eggs/etc. but isn't.

This is one such recipe.  It's from Christian Pirello of Christina Cooks and she calls it Vegan Fettucine Alfredo.  Actual alfredo sauce is buttered heavy cream, cooked down until it's super-thick and finished with fistfuls of parmesan cheese.  It's a heart attack in a pot.

This heart-healthier, plant-based "fettucine alfredo" is really NOTHING like real fettucine alfredo.  My husband made the snooty-face when he first tasted it because he was expecting something alfredo-y.

What it IS is awfully darn good once you get around that misnomer.  Once he got over his "this isn't alfredo" reaction, my husband loved it (ofc he did sprinkle some parmesan cheese on top of his, because pasta just isn't pasta until there's a flurry of parmesan on top in his world).

What the recipe IS is a white pesto...the only difference between this dish and a "true" white pesto is the relatively small amount of parmesan cheese which is understudied in the vegan production by miso paste.  No need to pretend like it's alfredo...it's pesto!

My one serious deviation from her recipe (aside from changing the name) is to omit sweetener.  I'm not quite sure why, but she feels the need to put brown rice syrup in everything.  This dish doesn't need it.

Lastly, the pesto (as with all pestos) can be made in advance and frozen. Just thaw it and add it to cooked pasta.

Pin It

Tofu Burgers

This recipe was among my first tries at cooking with tofu.  I think the original recipe came from one of Molly Katzen's Moosewood cookbooks, but I'm not entirely sure now.  I did find the combination of flavors in the OR both a little weird (tahini, miso and basil???) and underwhelming, and have over time found my own happy flavor mix.  But the basic technique for creating a burger patty out of tofu remains the same.  A delicious twist on this flavor mixture is using a curry paste instead of tomato paste with mint for the fresh herbs. 

The one thing you can do "wrong" here is to make the mixture too wet by not pressing enough moisture out of the thawed tofu or by adding too much stock.  The result will be a mushy patty rather than a toothsome burger at the end of cooking.

Pin It

Chinese BBQ Pork

Oh.My.Goodness.Delicious.

My kids are sick and therefore on a hunger strike against snot, but they demolished this pork (while leaving everything else on their plates untouched).  You can make this in advance to serve cold or reheat or just plan to use it in something else (recipe for THAT to come!)

This is adapted from the Frugal Gourmet (who else?) and his recommended cooking set-up is to put the marinated meat directly on your oven racks with a water-filled drip tray underneath.  My oven racks aren't clean enough for that ::blush:: and really, who wants to scrub honey-marinated pork bits off your whole flapping oven rack?  I devised a good work-around in using a cooling rack positioned over a 13x9 pan filled with water placed on a baking tray for transportability.

If you don't have red miso or black bean sauce on hand, you can sub in Marmite or just leave this out.

Pin It