Great Morning but a Busy Day and Vegan Grated Cheese Topping

I got my 8 hours of sleep and this morning I am back to normal. Good thing, I don’t think my hubby wanted to spend a second day with Debbie Downer. I was anything but Little Miss Sunshine yesterday!

Today I won’t be around as much as normal, but will be back later this evening. I have a few errands to run and have an appointment late this afternoon. Hopefully I will be home in time to make dinner. Otherwise we may have to go out for veggie sushi, darn.

Now, back to the important stuff, the food. Yesterday I decided to try my hand at making nut cheese slices in the dehydrator. The taste was good, but the texture wasn’t quite right. I now know that I need to start with the sauce spread thicker on the teflex and check the dehydrator more frequently. But overall, the experiment was all good, and I learned a lot from the process. As soon as I pick up more raw nuts I will be back to experimenting.

Since the “cheese” ended up more firm than I wanted I decided to dry it more and put it in the food processor. Voila, vegan grated cheese topping (like Parmesan). Don’t you love it when a failure turns into something completely new? Here is how I made it.

Vegan Grated Cheese Topping
Makes ¾ cup

Ingredients:

1 cup of raw cashews, soaked for two hours and drained thoroughly
1 tablespoon rice wine vinegar
1 tablespoon nutritional yeast
¼ cup water
salt, to taste (I used ¼ teaspoon)

Directions:

Combine everything in your blender and process until completely smooth. Adjust the salt to your taste, remembering that Parmesan is a very salty cheese if that is what you are going for.

Place the “cheese” on a teflex sheet on the dehydrator tray. Spread the cheese as thinly as possible (I used an offset spatula). Dehydrate until completely dry (about 8 hours at 105 degrees).

Crumble the pieces into your food processor and pulse until you have fine crumbs.

I am storing mine in the refrigerator so the nut oils won’t go bad. But if you use a lot of this sort of thing it should be stable at room temperatures for months.

Nutritional Information (per teaspoon):

Amount Per Serving
Calories - 15.62
Calories From Fat (63%) - 9.89

Total Fat - 1.16g
Saturated Fat - 0.21g
Cholesterol - 0mg
Sodium - 16.5mg
Potassium - 20.4mg
Total Carbohydrates - 0.97g
Fiber - 0.09g
Sugar - 0.16g
Protein - 0.48g

Comments:

This recipe was a mistake that turned into something else. I don’t know that I would have thought of this without the problem I had yesterday. But I am glad it worked out the way that it did. One of the things I have missed is a little Parmesan on top of food. Now I have a perfectly acceptable parm substitute without the mystery ingredients and commercial varieties contain. The only change I will make next time is to add more salt.

Unrelated note:

I need to get moving since I have a long list of things to do today. With a little luck I will be back later with a dinner recipe or two.

I hope you are all having a wonderful day. Stay warm!