Veganish Dot World

One of my goals here at Veganish is to show you don’t have to be a perfect vegan, or any kind of vegan, to reduce your animal product consumption, and that being vegan/ish isn’t only for picture-perfect Instagrammers with white marble counters and $1000 blenders who have a housecleaning service come in before they do their shoot. I snap my finds and foods as I go, I spend half a minute editing it with the default picture editor, and while my home isn’t a biohazard by any means, sometimes objects that don’t exactly belong might find their way in the background. I value my weekend time with my family, I value my evenings and if I’m tired, I figure the cleaning can wait until tomorrow morning.

Something about seeing perfectly staged food in a perfectly staged kitchen makes me feel like it’s unattainable. It’s beautiful to look at, sure, but I’m not here to feel bad about my housekeeping or photography abilities! I hope I can show delicious vegan food that you feel like you can give a shot on your kitchen counters with that Hotwheels car and yesterday’s junk mail hanging out with the scratched-up plastic cutting board. And while we’re speaking about being imperfectly perfect, my writing will likely have some malaproprisms sprinkled throughout, too. 😀 Sometimes, they’ll keep me up at night. (It’s happened more than once I’ve laid down for the night only to think to myself, I said “‘peak’ my interest” instead of ‘pique’ on the internets which are FOREVER. I gotta change that now! Maybe no one will notice!)

This evening I chose to make baked spaghetti with some of my Grocery Outlet finds including vegan bolognese sauce and the Follow Your Heart mozzarella. I already had spaghetti in my pantry and half a 14 oz. block of tofu. I was going for making a pourable mozzarella sauce, à la Miyoko’s, which isn’t a thing I can have because of cashews so I blended my tofu with a cup of water, about a tablespoon of flour, approximately half a cup of nutritional yeast, some vegan lactic acid (can easily be subbed with a tablespoon or so of lemon juice, vinegar or olive brine. I have lactic acid from my homemade vegan cheese days.) and about 3/4th of the block of FYH mozzarella (grated). I put my cooked spaghetti in a casserole dish, dumped the jar of bolognese, added a few sauteed mushrooms, mixed it up, and poured the blender cheese sauce on top. In my head, it was going to cook solid and stretchy, but it didn’t work out that way. But that’s not a bad thing! It ended up being a rose sauce of sorts, or like a marinara alfredo hybrid. It was very tasty regardless. “Failures” can be successes, you all. I made some garlic toast with some Lewis Texas Toast I got at Grocery Outlet a couple of weeks ago and Blue Bonnet plant butter (Walmart find) sprinkled with nutritional yeast and garlic powder to go with it. And now we’ll have a day or so worth of leftovers for easy lunches!

And speaking of things I wanted to do but aren’t going as planned, I wanted to share these photos as I described what I was doing throughout, but I’m a WordPress noob and it’s just not working for me right now so I’ll share them as a gallery for the time being.