Yes, I said nut cheese.
Go ahead and snigger like a group of 15-year-old boys listening to a report on Bolivian lakes.
I'll wait.
Alright, moving ahead.Last Tuesday night, Roomie was making penne to use up the last of the pesto. The smell of fresh pasta and cheap jar sauce filled the apartment; salty, starchy, and enticing. What's a 'girl gone raw' (patent pending) to do?
As with most of life's questions, the answer was found in vegetables. Delicious, un-cooked vegetables.
Step one: Mandolin a zucchini. Slice it in half long-ways and mandolin for wide "noodles;" slice in quarters long-ways for fetuccini-style "noodles."
Step two: Pull out your blender and whip up some nut cheese. This recipe is based off the "Middle Eastern Nut Cheese" recipe from The Raw Food Detox Diet cookbook.
Yes, I Said 'Nutcheese' Nutcheese (I think it tastes better if it's one word)
3 heaping tablespoons pine nuts
4 tablespoons macadamia nuts
4 tablespoons walnuts
2 ish tablespoons of lemon juice
a big handful of fresh parsley (stems and leaves)
1 tablespoon (more or less to taste) cheater garlic
7 sprays or Bragg's Liquid Aminos
1 teaspoon tamari
up to 1/4 cup of warm water
In a blender, pulse the nuts, parsley, and garlic. You may have to scrape the sides once or twice.
With the blender on low-medium speed, add the lemon juice, tamari and Bragg's, scraping the sides as needed.
Depending on what you'll be using the nutcheese for slowly add the water and increase the speed until the mixture is very smooth. The less water, the more spread-like the cheese. More water = salad dressing/pasta sauce.
Step 3: Toss the zucchini noodles with the cheese. Top with some vegetables (I used broccoli and cauliflower), fresh chopped tomatoes, a splash of basalmic vinegar if you're feelin' daring... and voila! Raw Fetuccini Alfredo.
***
Eating involves all the senses. Taste, at least for me, is often the least important part of the meal. Mouthfeel and to a lesser extent smell, can completely make or break and dish for me. Most of the cravings I get aren't for specific foods but for textures - crunchy, chewy, sticky, crispy etc. Mandolined zucchini feels like noodles; you can even sort of slurp them up like noodles. Nutcheese has the gritty/creamy feel of certain alfredo sauces. This is not to say that I miss noodles or alfredo sauce, rather that being vegan (and especially raw) makes you realize that your body doesn't need meat/dairy to satisfy it; that what it often wants isn't even the food itself, but some strange combination of nutrition and aesthetics.
But being raw/vegan shouldn't (and isn't for me) be about trying to fool your body into thinking it's still eating meat- and dairy-based dishes. (You might notice some health benefits at first, but eating soy- and rice-based cheese and veggie burgers every day can be just as detrimental to your health as the constant meat and dairy). Notice how in the previous sentences I didn't say "real" meat or cheese. A small pet peeve of mine is the rhetoric of food. Here's where my true English geek-hood is going to come shining through.
**Side note, if I may, to take a moment for a small tangent to argue that this is the point of a college education: not for me to remember who it was who first talked about signifiers and privledged language and when they wrote their groundbreaking case-studies, blah, blah, blah - but to be able to identify when language is being used biasedly, to skew a point of view; in other words, to always be aware that language is a living, moving, changing thing. End tangent. End side note.**
Getting back on track. Though it is sometimes impossible to get around using modifiers like "faux" or "fake" or "psuedo," these words place the concepts they're attached to in a subordinate position to something considered "real" or "actual;" viz. the food labeled "fake" and "faux" has no way of being identified except in relation to what is labeled "real" and "actual" and that relation is often seen as inferior
(Ya like that kids? Throwin' up a little Latin shout-out for all the scholars in the audience. Word to your maters.)
Fake cheese, fake meat, fake ice cream...these things all sound like plastic accessories to the Little Tykes kitchenette in my cousins' playroom. Faux sounds like something created in a lab. Or, like faux fur, something you wear/eat so people still think you're sporting/munching the real thing. Labeling vegetable-based foods as such also implies that there's something real (and by extension, right, true, better) about animal-based food. And we all know that's just not true.
My boss said to me recently, (in a conversation where I try to explain why I eat raw and vegan in a way that doesn't sound proselytizing or like I'm a snob), "why would I want to eat a fake hamburger when I could have the real thing?" And he's right. I don't want to eat fake hamburgers either. I want to eat real food. The ingredient lists on the food I eat almost never contain an unpronouncable word, don't have chemical prefixes and numeric suffixes. Hell, most of the time there isn't an ingredient list! One of the best parts of eating raw is knowing with out a doubt what is in the food on my plate.
Mmmm...now that's good rhetoric! :)
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