I made it vegetarian and now I’m taking one step further: vegan spaghetti carbonara. Can plants replace the magic that is egg and Parmesan cheese? Definitely not, but this comes close. It provides the same too-full feeling that most creamy pasta dishes do, leaving you feeling as if you swallowed a brick. Plus, it’s another use for my amazing Nutri Ninja. I feel better about that purchase every single day.
By the way, I recently enjoyed a vacation in Virginia Beach and really bungled it in the vegan department. By bungled it I mean stopped trying at all and boogie boarded across an ocean of cheese. I’m back at home now and looking forward to putting a lot of vegetables in my face.
Ingredients:
- 16 ounces of pasta
- Tofurkey sausages
- 1 block silken tofu
- 1 cup soaked cashews
- 1 tablespoon miso
- 1 tablespoon nutritional yeast
- Juice of half a lemon
- Black pepper
My roommate moved out and took half our kitchen supplies with him, so this is the biggest pot I have.
For the meat substitute I used my fave veg sausage. You can also use vegan bacon or even marinated tempeh.
I chopped up the sausage so it sort of resembles crumbles. One of my strongest childhood memories is helping my parents squeeze the meat out of sausage casings and then breaking it up with a wooden spoon, so I guess I was trying to replicate that. Despite my efforts, I’m still an adult.
To crisp up the meat I added a bit of oil. I got a bit overzealous and burned it, so be cautious.
These ingredients are the base of the sauce. The cashews were soaked overnight, leaving them soft and ready to be Ninja’d.
Nutritional yeast is like vegan Parmesan cheese, they sprinkle it on most things to make them better. I recently used it on a cheese-less pizza and although it’s no jumbo slice, it turned out well.
Put everything into the Ninja and blend. I added the black pepper, miso, and nutritional yeast to taste, so start with a little and increase the amount as necessary.
My new roommate Dragon helping me cook!
Stir everything up over low heat. The sauce is very thick, so add plenty of water as necessary.
Add basil leaves to distract from how beige everything else is.
Enjoy!
