Easy Mushroom-Tomato Pasta Sauce

A super easy, tasty, accompaniment to your favorite pasta! 

Fresh whole wheat pappardelle with sauce

Ingredients 

1 large onion, diced (about 1-1/2 cups)

1-1/2 cups sliced mushrooms

1-1/2 cup diced plum tomatoes (remove pulp and seeds)

2 tbsp olive oil

Salt

Black pepper

Optional: 1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Directions

If you are starting with whole mushrooms, very quickly rinse them under cold water to remove dirt (don't soak, because mushrooms easily absorb water and then you are left with yucky soggy mushrooms!); afterwards, gently dry them on a clean towel, and spread out to let dry further.

Heat oil in large non-reactive skillet (stainless steel preferably; don't use aluminum as the acids in the tomato can discolor and give an off flavor to the sauce ). 

Add mushrooms, and add a dash of salt. Stir to coat, and sauté over medium-high heat for about 4-5 min. Stir in onions, sprinkle another dash of salt in, and cook another 5 or so until onions are translucent. Add in tomatoes, add a sprinkle of salt and pepper, and cook about 4 min. Season to taste with salt and pepper to finish the sauce.  

If you are ok with cheese, you can stir in about 1/3 cup grated Parmesan at this point. 

Toss the sauce with cooked pasta and fresh parsley (you can reserve some to around on top or mix it all in). Now, dig in!

Macaroni and Vegan Vegetable-Cashew "Cheeze" sauce

Today I tried a recipe from ohsheglows.com called Vegan Mac N' Cheese.

I'm usually intrigued when I find a vegan "cheese" recipe, wondering how it could possibly compare to dairy cheese. So, upon tasting the sauce, it didn't make me think of cheese, but the words, "wow" and "yum" definitely came to mind!! I hope people who are not vegan will still try this recipe because they would be missing out on something really rather interesting!

Here is the link to the recipe: http://ohsheglows.com/2010/11/23/vegan-mac-n-cheese/

The only things I changed were:

• used the earth balance in making the sauce instead of with the bread crumbs
• used gluten free panko crumbs for the topping
• used gluten free brown rice pasta
• used coconut milk original instead of almond milk 

I also used a bit more veggies than the recipe called for, and so I ended up with A LOT of sauce (about 3.5 cups or so). I only used about 1 cup with the pasta, and put the rest in an ice cube tray to freeze (it was a bit tricky getting these out later...it might help to line the tray with plastic wrap to help pop them out, or maybe make sure to use a flexible tray because mine is rather rigid and difficult enough to bend to get ice out). 

One last note... I found that the taste was much more flavorful BEFORE, so I actually would recommend just using this sauce as soon as you make it, because it's amaaazing! (Baking dried it out quite a bit, and made me inclined to add some salt).