vegan spaghetti and vegan 'parmesan' cashew powder, using coffee grinder

 

The main item I want to focus on is the vegan 'cheese'.

Rather than buy the nasty processed vegan cheeses that are typically sold in health food stores,

I prefer to make mine fresh. It's much faster, easier, healthier, and tastes better.

Top of picture is a black and decker coffee grinder, costs about 15$.

I bought it from amazon, I also bought a 4 year extended warranty for 4$.

These coffee blenders tend to break easily for no reason, so the warranty is worth it.

What I used above in the picture, is ground up organic raw cashew, unsalted. (costs about 10$/lb from costco).

Looks like parmesan cheese, has a similar consistency, and I use it in the way it's often used in the picture above, with spaghetti.

It doesn't taste like parmesan, but it has it's own distinct, delicious cashew nutty fatty satisfying flavor, goes great with spaghetti type dishes.

If you added some olive oil, salt, garlic, basil, it would probably taste like parmesan made pesto sauce.

The takeway from this article is the coffee grinder lets you make all kind of vegan 'cheeses' using various kinds of nuts.

I've also ground almonds, walnuts, black sesame seeds (toasted), to great effect.

You're probably going to get much more nutrient absorption by doing this, it's like getting machine assisted chewing breaking down roughage thousands of times more finely than you would ever have the time to do with your teeth. 

You can use it in your salad dressing, and I like to use this instead of nut butters.

And another thing is I like to do it fresh and eat it right away. Nut butters get rancid quickly, and they make you constipated.

Nut powders digest easily. 

coffee grinder cleaning tip:

coffee grinders can be serious pain to clean until you figure out a few tricks, since you can't just run it under the water in the sink.

I keep a toothbrush just for cleaning this device.

I brush up nut powder debris, takes about 1 minute.

With a damp slightly soapy dish sponge but with most of the water squeezed out so it doesn't damage the device, wipe down what I can. (about 20 seconds)

Then I rinse the soap out of the sponge, squeeze out as much water out of sponge as I can, then wipe down the device again trying to remove any soap residue.

Then I have a clean rag just for the device, and wipe up any dampness. (about a more minute for all of above),

Then I set it out in the sun for 5 minutes for the device and the rag to dry up, as I'm doing other kitchen cleanup.

It's a pain in the butt to clean at first, but once you get used to it, the 3 minutes or so it takes is well worth it to have the freshest vegan cheese possible.

Sometimes I'll make extra portion to last 1 or 2 more days, but generally I like to just make as much as I need for the day.