Sunday, November 14, 2010

Forays into nutritional yeast

Inspired by some of the excellent vegan blogs out there, I decided that I wanted to try making some food that included nutritional yeast. It seemed like a lot of the vegan recipes that needed a tangy cheese kind of flavor used it in combination with a salty item like miso or soy sauce.

I started with a sauce made with finely diced onion sauteed in olive oil, 4 cloves of pressed garlic, a shake of red pepper flakes and a shake of smoked paprika, a spoonful of red miso paste, some salt, soy milk and fresh basil. For tonight's meal, I reconstituted some dried sun-dried tomatoes (a recent PCC score) and added them to the sauce.
Served it with some whole-wheat gnocci (a recent Trader Joe's score). It was very tasty.
The remaining sauce I mixed with some kidney beans and will probably eat with greens and rice, or perhaps with squash as I tried a new variety this week.
The new squash is a "turban squash." I got a small one to try it out, but most of them at the store are enormous. The shell stayed somewhat hard after baking so it would be a good one to use as a serving bowl for squash soup. On first taste, it was not as sweet as the delicata and also it was a bit wetter which is not my favorite, but mixed in with the delicata and some other flavors I imagine I will enjoy it.
All in all, a successful cooking experiment day. And Adelaide was happy, because she got a couple of hours to play spelling and math games on the iPad.

1 comment:

Christine said...

If you'd like to know more about nutritional yeast, here's an interesting article:

http://www.smdp.com/Articles-c-2009-04-24-52910.113116_Singing_the_praisesof_nutritional_yeast.html