Recipe Wednesday!

So here is a concoction I whipped up last night for my husband and I. It is a vegan dish. Basically, we buy all the ingredients that we like (+we always have our pantry staples that I mentioned in my second post). For a long time I did the whole, find a recipe, buy the ingredients, make-it thing. But I kept forgetting an ingredient and it tasted bad, or my husband will never want it again. He likes to keep things fresh and always try new flavors. We used to eat eggplant with red sauce a lot, but of course, he's sick of it now. So I've been playing around with new sauces and gravies. And now I will share with you!

Italian Flavored Falafel, Fried Eggplant, and Quinoa Pasta with "Cheese" Sauce

What you need:
1 can chickpeas
1/2 cup of Italian Breadcrumbs (I processed 2 slices of bread with oregano)
1 medium eggplant 
2 servings of Quinoa Pasta (1/2 a box usually)
1 tbsp ground flax
1/4 cup warm water
4 tbsp coconut oil

Sauce:
Mozzarella Daiya Cheese www.daiyafoods.com/
1/4 cup Almond Milk
3 tbsp Earth Balance Vegan Butter
3 tbsp Brown Rice Flour
1/4 cup Vegetable Broth
Salt & Pepper

How to Prepare Eggplant (for any dish)

1. Start first by skinning and then cutting up the eggplant into whatever size you would like in your  mouth :) Place the eggplant onto paper towels. I know, not the most eco-friendly but one time I did it on a towel and the eggplant tasted like my detergent :-/
2. Salt the eggplant, and use another paper towel and your hand to squish out all of the water. And yes that is an infamous Rachel Ray trash bowl in the middle picture, so perfect for dumping into my compost pile after I'm done cooking!
3. Your paper towel should look like the picture on the right, all covered in eggplant juice. Now let the eggplant sit for about 10 minutes.
*This allows your eggplant to cook faster and taste better. If you've had problems cooking eggplant before, it could be that it was too full of water.

Now before we prepare our falafel mixture...

How to Make a Flax Egg (to be used as a binder for falafel, veggie burgers, or veggie scrambles)

1. Heat up 1/4 cup of water in the microwave & mix in 1 tbsp of ground flax. If you are making a lot of falafel (or any other dish), just double your flax egg.

2. Stir it up with a fork and set it aside for 10 minutes.

* Now's a good time to get your Quinoa Pasta cooking according to the package instructions!

Now for the rest of the Falafel:
Open your can of chick peas, drain, and rinse.
Process your chick peas with the breadcrumbs, or process them and then transfer to a bowl and hand mix with the bread crumbs. (You can add whatever spices you want to. Maybe throw in chopped onion or parsley, etc. Make this falafel yours!) Make sure that flax egg has sat for a good 7-10 minutes, and then mix it into your chick pea breadcrumb mixture with your hands. Taste it! Add salt and pepper if you need to. It should already taste pretty good in this form before you fry it!

Left pic is before I added the flax egg binder, right picture is after.

The flax egg makes it so much easier to roll your mixture up into balls and transfer them and also having them stick together while frying.

Heat up 2 tbsp coconut oil. When it is heated, carefully transfer your lil balls into the pan!

Flip me!! Don't forget to heat both sides throughout, then remove from the pan. Add two more tbsp of coconut oil, and begin frying the eggplant until crispy brown.

Okay so now for this sauce! 

Everything you need for this sauce + any other sauce. Only thing not pictured is the Daiya vegan cheese. (I forgot to get it in the pic!)

1. In a small sauce pan, melt the earth balance vegan butter. Once it is melted, whisk in the brown rice flour until it is completely mixed.

2. Add the almond milk and again, mix completely. Then let it sit for 3-4 minutes and thicken. This is your roux (pronounced ROO). The roux is very important and can be a base for ANY sauce that you want to make. From here, you can literally add whatever you want to the mix. 

3. Continue by adding the vegetable broth, whisk it in. Then add the Daiya. Add salt and pepper to taste. Voila! Yummy cheese sauce. 

FOR FUTURE REFERENCE: 

If you just want to make gravy, to the roux add: extra vegetable broth, and extra 2 tbsp of vegan butter and 1 tbsp extra of rice flour, & lots of salt and pepper to taste. No cheese. Perfect for mashed potatoes.

You can also add pureed cauliflower with a little white wine for another sauce variation. For a yellow "cheese" sauce, puree a cooked potato and carrots, then add to your sauce.

Drain your pasta and mix it thoroughly with the cheese sauce. Plate the pasta with the eggplant on top of it and the falafel on the side or on top, depending on your preference. I ended up slathering the cheese sauce all over everything because it was so good.

My Husband licked his plate clean. Nough' said.

Where's the protein?

In the falafel, since it was made from protein rich chickpeas, about 12g. Chickpeas have iron too!

Quinoa Pasta has about 4g protein per serving. 

I love me some good carbs:
Eggplant: very low in Saturated Fat and Cholesterol. It is also a good source of Vitamin K, Thiamin, Vitamin B6, Folate, Potassium and Manganese, and a very good source of Dietary Fiber. 
Daiya Cheese: about 7g

So obviously, you don't have to follow my recipe exactly! That's the point. I'm just trying to share the things that I do to create fun combinations. I won't lie, my husband's boredom with the same food has actually made cooking very fun for me. I'm always trying to make new things, always trying to please his taste buds. I had so much fun whipping this dinner up! I got to be creative, use what I already had on hand, and it was a challenge to make a new sauce that I've never made before. I'm looking forward to sharing new combinations that I come up with in the kitchen! 

Namaste <3