One of my key recommendations when eating a high plant based diet is to make sure you are getting enough healthy fats with every meal. This is harder than you think because most of us are still deeply conditioned to think of ‘light’ foods as healthier and so we skip the dressings and eat our veggies plain. But healthy fats are the key to making our bodies burn fat, keeping our metabolism on point on and helping us feel full. In addition the fats from extra virgin olive oil help us to assimilate the nutrients from plants.
So now that you are armed with this information you will need some recipes and this is where this delectable cashew cheese comes in. Whip this sauce up at the beginning of your week, freeze in 3 tbs portions, and then create away.
To give you an idea you can use this sauce as a base for: cold-potato salad dressing, caesar salad dressing, cauliflower style ‘mac n cheese’, zoodles, creamed spinach, egg salad, tuna salad, veggie dip (like hummus) or simply with poached eggs and avocado (like a hollandaise). So many options!
Here’s the recipe.
Ingredients:
- 1 Cup Cashews, pre-soaked for 12 hours or so then rinsed
- 1/3 Cup Extra virgin olive oil (I use Cobram Estate, watch my olive oil tips here)
- 3 tbs nutritional yeast (gut friendly yeast high in B vitamins, get from health food store)
- 1 tsp organic high quality dijon mustard
- 2 tbs water
- 2 tbs white wine (optional)
- Juice of half lemon
- 1 clove crushed garlic
- Salt to taste
Blend all the ingredients in the blender (I am loving my new Nutribullet Rx which is very powerful for this sort of thing), adding a little more water if needed to get the right consistency. It thickens when it sets, keeping in mind if you wanted it to set harder you could add butter, ghee or coconut oil.
That’s it! Pop it into a glass jar to refrigerate (keeps up to 5 days), or freeze portions for using later.
When using as the base for other sauces try blending into more olive oil, greek yogurt, coconut cream or yogurt, or broth to change the consistency and flavour. A few spoonfuls with olive oil and apple cider vinegar and we have a beautifully creamy salad dressing, so easy.
Like I said, this sauce is really so versatile and such a good staple to add that clean flavour and fats to your veggies and proteins making it all even more nutritious.
Love to hear what you think!
xo Sita
