Blissful Chef inspired Mac´n´cheese

The sauce I make in this blogpost is a modified version of a recipe from one of my favourite vegan bloggers, Christy Morgan aka the Blissful Chef.  I should note that I made a double batch (that is four servings) and I didn´t bake the dish in the oven after mixing the pasta with the sauce. The sauce tasted amazingly much like the good old cheese sauce of pre-macro days, so if you are craving cheese, definitely give this a try! 😀

Cook your pasta (I use corn pasta) and save one cup of the cooking water. Whisk the cooking  water together with a cup of rice milk (or other vegan milk), one cup of nutritional yeast, 2 tbsp of starch (I used kuzu) diluted in a bit of milk, 2 tbsp shoyu soy sauce, 2 tsp natural organic mustard, 2 tsp white (shiro) miso and some dried garlic powder. Then heat 2 tbsp of oil in a cast iron skillet or pot and whisk in 5 tbsp of brown rice flour. After a minute or so whisk in the prepared sauce, stirring continuously until you get a rather thick creamy texture. Mix sauce together with cooked pasta and vegetables – as you can see in the picture, I used blanched broccoli, and on the plate I sprinkled the dish with some smoked paprika powder.

Pasta with homemade almond-basil pesto

There´s nothing like a good bowl of pasta with a delicious pesto sauce…it´s not a very typical macro dish, but it´s something I appreciate immensely. This pesto is dairy-free and uses almonds instead of the more usual pine nuts or cashews. Almonds are the most alkalizing of nuts, so why not 🙂

I made corn pasta (my favourite glutenfree type of pasta) with some blanched carrots and green beans and a sprinkling of organic corn kernels from a jar.

For the sauce you will need 1 or 2 cloves of garlic (I used 2 for my candida clearing plan :-D), a generous bunch of fresh basil leaves, 1/2 tsp sea salt, 2 tbsp of oil (I used the incredibly fragrant cold-pressed pumpkinseed oil purchased in Slovenia), a dash of black pepper, 1 tbsp lemon juice and 1/4 cup of almonds which I soaked overnight and peeled their skins off the next day. Soaking almonds makes them more digestible and removes the enzyme inhibitors found in all nuts, seeds, grains and legumes.

First place the nuts with oil, salt, pepper, lemon juice and garlic into your blender on “pulse” setting and shortly process into a chunky mixture (depending on your preference, of course). When that is done, add basil and pulse again for a more chunky pesto or blend on higher speed for a smooth cream. Serve on top of pasta with veggies.

 

Soba noodles with carrot-tofu sauce

Another supersimple sauce for your pasta is here, this time starring tofu and carrot!

It has exactly FOUR ingredients: tofu, carrot, ume plum vinegar and barley miso. First steam a chunk of tofu (about 50 g per person should suffice) and a small handful of carrot chunks in a steaming basket, about 20 minutes, or until the carrot gets soft enough to be easily prickled by a fork. Then transfer to blender, adding 1/2 tsp barley miso, about 2 tsp ume plum vinegar and warm water from the steaming (amount depends on desired consistency). Serve over noodles (mine were buckwheat noodles – soba) and garnish with cut up nori strips.

Pasta with baked tempeh and creamy broccoli sauce

I am lately experimenting a bit with sauces, which are somehow not so commonly used in standard macrobiotic cooking, but I do miss them at times…whether it´s Italian-style pasta sauces or more hearty and thick “dumpling” sauces of the Czech type. This time I decided to make a creamy, but not too heavy vegetable sauce on top of our pasta.

As a protein I marinated and then baked some thinly sliced tempeh, placed in one layer in a baking dish. For the marinade I used (for a chunk of about 100 g tempeh) 1 tsp tamari, 2 tsp water, 1/2 tsp organic mustard and 1/2 tsp of fresh ginger juice which I mixed in a bowl and then poured on top of the slices in the baking dish. I baked the tempeh on about 180°C, for 15 minutes, then flipped over and baked another 10 minutes (but it really depends on how thick you slice your tempeh, mine was very thin, so it came out a bit too dry for my taste, but at least it was very crunchy).

For the sauce I water-sauteed a larger onion with some salt and chopped wild garlic, then added broccoli small florets/stems and water to cover. I simmered the veggies until tender and then mixed in 1 tablespoon of white rice flour diluted in a bit of cold water, watching out for lumps and stirring well. I let the sauce come to boil, added half a tablespoon of shiro miso and half a tablespoon of tamari, and let simmer for a few more minutes. Then I transferred the content into a blender (I split the sauce into two batches – otherwise your sauce will fly out of the blender, so be careful about the amount!) and blended until smooth. I returned the sauce into the pot and brought back to boil, simmering an additional one minute or so.

In the pictures you can see the sauce with tempeh on top of (my boyfriend´s) whole-wheat pasta and also on top of my buckwheat/whole-wheat soba noodles.

Fake tomato sauce with pasta! :-)

I reeeeally like tomato sauce, Italian style, on my pasta. Well, since tomatoes are nightshades, and thus far on the yin scale, they are rarely used in macrobiotic cooking. So I reached for a recipe into my favourite recipe book by Susan Marque (I believe you can still buy them, paperback or download, from Susan´s website!). The only thing I didn´t have (and still don´t have, damn it!) is thyme. Otherwise I used:

7 large carrots (yep, that´s a lot, this recipe is for about 3-4 portions of sauce for people who like a lot of sauce…)

1 small beet peeled

2 onions

4 cloves or garlic

1 celery stalk

1 bay leaf

about 2 cups water

oregano

basil

thyme

1/4 cup parsley (I had just dried one)

olive oil

salt

I chopped up the carrots, beet, celery and one of the onions into big chunks and cooked them with 2 cups of water, salt and the bay leaf for about 20 minutes until all got soft. Then transferred to a blender and pureed until smooth. Meanwhile I sauteed diced onion, diced garlic and all the spices on some olive oil. Then  I poured the blended vegetables into the pan with the onion, garlic and spices. The sauce has a beautiful red-purplish colour which really in a way resembles tomato sauce! But don´t be fooled, the texture is different and this sauce is much sweeter because of the carrots and beets. I also really liked the sauce mixed in quinoa the other day!