Vegan Mac and Cheese

Oh yeah, good eats.


Warning: You have to start this a day before you want it. Need to soak the Cashews overnight.


Ingredients:
1 lb Macaroni
1.5 C RAW Whole Cashews (this means not roasted or toasted or smoked or anything)
3/4 C Nutritional Yeast (get this at Whole Foods or other cool grocer)
1.5 T Dijon Mustard
1 T Garlic Powder
1 t Turmeric
1 t Salt
1.5 t Miso Paste (if you have it)
1 T Flour
Some heat (like cayenne or ground dried chilis, to taste)
1/4 cup margarine (earth balance makes vegan)
Soy Milk for getting the consistency right at the very end.


Night before: Put Cashews in a bowl, cover with water by an inch put in fridge. You don't really have to. I've done the soak for two hours and everything was fine.


Next afternoon/evening: Boil water and add pasta, cook according to directions on box. Drain and rinse cashews. Put cashews in vitamix, cover barely with water and blend for two minutes.


Then, add everything else to the vitamix except the margarine and blend well. 


Drain pasta well. Melt margarine in the pot that had the pasta. Pour the Macaroni in the pot and stir with the margarine. Then pour in all the sauce and mix it around. Add soy milk or other non-dairy milk to get the sauce to the right consistency. The "right" consistency is something a little thinner than you want. It will get drier as the mac absorbs the sauce. It will be "runny" looking if you have it right.


Optional: You can at this point make some kind of killer topping for the mac. Easy to do is just toasted bread and grind up. Put it on the top and then pour some melted earth balance margarine on top. For something even better, make my garlic bread (sans olive oil) and crush up the bread into crumbs for the topping. You want to slow roast the bread so that it is dry all the way through.


I've done a few alterations on this one with great success. I took 1lb of broccoli and cut it into big pieces then dropped in the boiling pasta water and removed with slotted spoon (this is before the pasta went in). Then, chopped up that broc into small pieces. Halved the amount of pasta down to 1/2 lb. Really good and boosts the nutrition.