No Whey, It’s Vegan Dinner Day!

I was challenged via e-mail to do a vegan dinner. I think that I do an alright job of having vegetarian dishes or ones that are easily adaptable to a vegetarian diet for the most part, but vegan is a little harder for me. Aside from the fact that I love dairy and eggs, I find vegan cooking to be generally either time consuming or expensive, especially in the winter. I am also not a fan of soy or soy products, so my options are pretty limited. All of the recipes used in this meal were inspired by those on The Vegan Chef.

As an entr we had Spaghetti Squash Pomodoro. I personally like spaghetti squash and used to eat a lot of it while low-carbing because it's the next best thing to real pasta, but this recipe didn't do it for me. I sort of went against my better judgment and followed the recipes word for word. Perhaps if I had prepared an actual tomato sauce and cooked it as though I normally would (just bake and scrape and top with sauce) the flavor of the tomatoes would not have completely leeched out.

While I've never been a fan of soy, I do enjoy a wide variety of beans. I love simple bean salads and the Balsamic 6 Bean Salad is no exception. It's a very simple dress and refrigerate salad that will have marinated sufficiently by the time the other dishes are finished. It's a nice meaty alternative with a tangy vinaigrette that's full of vitamins and fiber.

Finally, I'd never actually had polenta before, but it's always seemed easy enough to make. I've always enjoyed watching cooking shows where people would bake it and cut out fancy shapes for gourmet plating, but I just made a simple Creamy Polenta with sautéed zucchini and garlic. I used margarine as a substitute for butter to give it a creamier consistency, making sure I didn't have any whey or lactic acid or anything in the ingredients. Polenta is very much like a yellow cream of wheat. I can see how it could be dressed up quite easily since I thought it was very good with residual dressing from the bean salad.