Easy Vegan Mac and Cheese

We found out our quarantine orders have just been extended. So we’ve decided it’s only fitting to not only eat but share our favorite healthy comfort food recipes. At a time like this, our go to comfort has been this amazing vegan Mac & Cheese. An easy healthy recipe, made in under 30 minutes.

This is one of Luna’s all time favorite recipes. She prefers to cook with whole foods, and when possible, to go light on the nuts. Most vegan cheese recipes, if made from scratch, are predominantly nut based. This recipe does contain cashews, but it’s optional, and can be made completely nut free. The cashews, if used, give the cheese sauce better thickness.

Potato Carrot Mac and Cheese

The base of this recipe is carrots and potatoes. We used spices such as turmeric and smoked paprika to really give the sauce a smokey zing. The key ingredient to achieving a cheesy flavor in this mac and cheese is nutritional yeast. The nutritional yeast helps develop more depth to the cheese sauce flavor.

Easy Recipe Tips

Instead of going out to the store, we have been ordering produce from imperfect foods. Our produce comes in many different sizes, all perfectly imperfect. So for this recipe we measured quantities in grams since the size of our produce isn’t normal conventional size (same great taste though!).

There are only a couple tricks to the cheese sauce, but overall it’s a very forgiving recipe.

Those who want to be a bit more technical, the potatoes do cook faster than the carrots so it is best to have the carrots cooking longer than the potatoes. Lately we’ve been in no rush to go anywhere, so we take the time to boil the carrots for about 5 minutes prior to adding the potatoes. But if in a rush there’s no problem adding the potatoes and carrots together to boil. You’ll just need to make sure the potatoes and carrots are really blended in the end!

Also, if the texture is too thick feel free to add the left over boiling liquid to the blender and mix. We like to add enough to make a Velveeta cheese-like texture.

With that said this cheesy sauce is also really versatile and can be used as a dip as well.

If you tried one of our recipes or found our articles helpful, let us know in the comments below how it turned out!

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Peace,
Luna & Nate

Easy Vegan Mac and Cheese

Recipe by Cooking Up Vegan Course: SidesCuisine: AmericanDifficulty: Easy

Servings

16

servings

Prep time

10

minutes

Cooking time

30

minutes

Total time

40

minutes

Dairy free vegan Mac and cheese made using whole foods.

Ingredients

• 555 g 555 White Potato, peeled and cubed (About 10 small potatoes)

• 209 g 209 Orange Carrots, peeled and chopped (About 5 long medium/small carrots)

• 111 g 111 Cashews, raw (Optional)

• 153 g 153 Spanish Onion, diced (About 1/2 a large onion)

• 1/4 tsp 1/4 Turmeric powder

• 3/4 tsp 3/4 Smoked Paprika

• TT tt TT (We used 2 1/2 tsp)

• 1/4 cup 1/4 Lemon Juice

• 1 cup 1 Boiling liquid

• 2/3 cup 2/3 Nutritional yeast

• TT tt TT Black Pepper

• 1 1/2 lb 1 1/2 Pasta (We used penne)

Directions

• Boil the carrots, potatoes and cashews for about 20 minutes or until very soft.
• Using a small pan, saute the diced onions in light olive oil until seared.
• At this point, begin another pot of water to cook the pasta. Follow the directions depending on the type of pasta you’re using.
• Once the carrots, potatoes and cashews are fully cooked and soft add them to a blender. Additionally, add the boiling water, turmeric, smoked paprika, salt, lemon juice,nutritional yeast, and black pepper.
• Blend on high until a smooth thick and creamy cheese sauce develops.
• If needed add additional carrot/ potato boiling liquid to smooth out the sauce if needed.
• Once the pasta has finished cooking, add the cheese sauce to the pasta and mix.
• Serve and enjoy!

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