Pizza!

Sometimes you just don't feel like thinking about cooking and sometimes you need to clean out the fridge. Yesterday was a bit of both.

I had some sauce leftover, 1/2 a package of Cheezly. jalapenos and tomatoes that were super ripe and a few pieces of seitan. So, what better way to use it than to make pizza?

The pizza dough recipe is the No Rise Crust recipe from Recipezaar. I prefer a wetter dough so I cut back on the flour a little bit. Sure, it doesn't have a developed taste like long rising/fermenting doughs but it is quick, easy and pretty good.

So there you have it, a clean-out-the-fridge Sunday dinner. Fast, easy, tasty and so much cheaper (and tastier) than delivery.

Macaroni in a Cashew / Almond "Cheese" Sauce

Macaroni in a cashew / almond "cheese" sauce with a side of sauteed beet greens.

I've been making a lot of cashew-based sauces lately and I think this is my favourite so far. It's a more delicate taste than your traditional heavy nutritional yeast sauces (I still like those). The reason why it doesn't look creamy is because this is a photo of the macaroni the next day after all the sauce has soaked in. The day of, it was beautifully creamy.

Anyway, here's the recipe I concocted. I'm not reinventing the wheel as there are so many cashew sauces out there and they are all pretty simple.

Notes: If you want a smooth sauce, pre-soak the nuts for a few hours, then drain.

For step two, if you have a large blender, then throw everything in. If you have a food processor though, ad the water gradually as I mentioned.

You can use just cashews if you want and you could probably cut the amount of nuts down too to a total of 1 or 1.5 cups since raw nuts aren't cheap.

Macaroni in a Cashew / Almond "Cheese" Sauce

1 lb macaroni, uncooked
yellow mustard (to coat cooked macaroni)

1 cup raw cashews
1 cup raw almonds
1/2 cup nutritional yeast
salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder and celery seed (to taste)
1 small red pepper, cooked until soft (optional)
1/4 cup olive oil (optional)
2-4 tbsps lemon juice (to taste)
4 cups water

1. Cook your pasta until al dente. Drain and toss with enough yellow mustard to lightly coat each piece and then set aside.
   
   
2. Put all the dry ingredients into your blender or food processor and process until it is a fine powder. For the seasonings, start with 1 tsp of everything except salt. For the salt, start with 1/2 tsp or go with 1 tsp if you like salt. 1/2 tsp probably isn't near enough but it's better to start undersalted and then adjust accordingly. You can adjust the seasonings later when it is simmering in the pot. When everything is processed, add in the optional red pepper, lemon juice and oil and process until the mixture is uniform.
   
   
3. With the motor running, slowly pour in the water, a little at a time and process until nice and smooth. Stop if your blender or food processor is getting too full (you can always add the rest of the water in the pot). Taste and adjust seasonings.
   
   
4. Put the entire sauce mixture in a large saucepan and heat on medium-high while whisking constantly. Taste and adjust seasonings as necessary. Let the sauce cook until mixture is thickened
   
   
5. Mix the macaroni into the sauce and serve as is OR put into a greased casserole dish, top with breadcrumbs and bake at 350F until bubbly (15 to 30 mins depending on how you like your baked mac & cheese).

Hope you like it! Here's a bonus pic of sweet summer corn from our CSA.

"B" is for "Broccoli"

Oven roasted broccoli and cherry tomatoes (from our garden) topped with crumbled Cheezly.

The broccoli and tomatoes were tossed with a liberal amount of olive oil, salt, pepper and nutritional yeast and then roasted in the oven (425F) for about 30 mins and then topped with crumbled Cheezly. Simple but delicious.

What's peeking out in the top right corner is some homemade mushroom gravy. Not pictured: slices of seitan roast and rice pilaf. I just wanted to focus on the broccoli for this post.

Seitan "Parmesan"

Seitan, breaded and fried with Cheezly "mozzarella" on top of spaghetti with homemade slow-simmered tomato sauce.

We had a ton of tomatoes to use up along with some green pepper, mushrooms and celery. I though that was the start of a great sauce so I chopped, seasoned and simmered until the sauce was thick and very reduced (about 2 hours). I didn't bother peeling or de-seeding the tomatoes because I don't mind the skins and seeds.

I whipped up a batch of seitan in the meantime to go along with it. We had some really crappy seitan yesterday (not made by me) so I wanted to made some good stuff today. I used Joy's basic seitan (tester) recipe with my own modifications and with Italian herbs and then simmered, chilled, breaded and fried it.

I literally spent all afternoon on this dish, making everything from scratch aside from the Cheezly and pasta noodles. Was it worth it? I think so!