Open-Face Sandwich: Cashew Cheese, Tomatoes, and Basil

I've been experimenting with nut cheese lately. I wasn't able to get raw cashews, which I know may affect the taste and texture. I've been experimenting with roasted unsalted cashews, soaked and blended. The first time around, I added sundried tomatoes, salt, lemon juice, water and garlic. My errors? Too much garlic, a little too much salt, kind of bleh. This time? 1 clove of garlic, a touch of sea salt, a little water, some nutritional yeast, and a touch of liquid smoke. Not bad. I am not in love with the texture - it's like hummus but weird, but not bad. Hard to explain.

Mr. Coconut has not tasted any of it yet, it's far too much into it's infancy to be worth giving to others yet. I like it, it's not bad. But I've had amazing raw nut cheese before, and this is not it yet.

With all that negativity, I liked this sandwich. It was delicious. I also tried the "cheese" with some pasta. Again, I need to get the texture to a better consistency. Maybe in the Magic Bullet as opposed to my tiny food processor would get it there.

Sweet Potato Oatmeal Casserole: From "Oh She Glows"

This is a sweet potato oatmeal casserole from the vegan blog, "Oh She Glows". The recipe can be found HERE.

Basically, it's oatmeal with a cooked sweet potato and banana mashed in, then covered with a crunchy pecan topping and baked.

The only changes I made were: I used 1 cup coconut milk beverage from So Delicious and 1 cup soymilk. I didn't have chia seeds, so I used a little more oats.

Delicious breakfast for several days! I really like the blog "Oh She Glows" and found it in a round about way. Hopefully I will do more recipes from there in the future.

Pesto Chicken Sandwich: Leftovers Day 3

What else can be done with leftover ingredients from Stuffed Manicotti?

Sandwiches! The sandwich above consists of 1 Morningstar Chik'n Griller, a schmear of pesto tofu ricotta, and some tomato bruschetta mix. The bread is Arnold's brand. I've been a fan of their sandwich thins, and now they have flat/skinny hot dog "buns" called fill 'ems. They aren't on their website yet, but Wegman's has it up on their site, here.

Stuffed Shells

The best part about making Stuffed Manicotti is that we usually make a lot of it, so we have lots of leftovers. We had some jumbo pasta shells, so for the past couple days we have been making dishes of 2-3 shells filled with tofu pesto ricotta and covered with sauce.

Stuffed Manicotti Dinner

Mr. Coconut and I cooked a tasty Italian-style dinner for Mr. Coconut's Grandparents. We decided to make one of our favorite meals, Stuffed Manicotti, which I've blogged about before.

I made some focaccia-style bread and some bruschetta mix to go with it. We made some sauce from a combination of some canned whole peeled tomatoes, onion, garlic, olive oil, oregano, tomato paste, and basil. The star of the show, though, is the pesto tofu ricotta. A blend of basil, garlic, olive oil and walnuts for pesto; mixed with extra firm tofu. We stuffed that into cooked manicotti and then spooned sauce over the top and baked it to heat through everything.

We served the meal with a salad of greens, onions, snap peas, and pepitas (pumpkin seeds toasted and salted).

A Close-up of the meal: