Sequestration Meal #327

 

This looks weird, but bear with me: do you remember Hamburger Helper?

This is like that, but vegan.

I found a recipe for taco pasta it looked like I could veganize, so I went with it. I made the wrong choice of pasta shapes and I figured I might be making the wrong choice before I did it, but we are using things up around here and I'm not buying pasta again until I am out of pasta so gigli it is. But the gigli kind of broke a lot by the time it was done, so it no longer looks like trumpets so much as...bits? 

I used Butler Foods taco meat mix (essentially taco-flavored TVP) as the flavor base here and didn't add taco seasoning (which I don't have anyway), and the cheese I used was only about half what it would have been if it had been dairy cheese because in my opinion vegan cheese goes a long way. I used slices of Trader Joe's non-dairy American chopped up to stand in for Velveeta and about 1/2 a cup of So Delicious non-dairy Mexican-style shreds for the other cheeses. I made broth out of Better Than Bouillon No Chicken and No Beef, Earth Balance for the butter, and almond milk for the milk--you know the drill here; there is a sub for everything, really, so is this the original recipe at all?

Whatever. It was nice and cheesy and spicy and full of tomato flavor so I didn't care about my broken pasta. Also, it got me to finally break into that taco meat mix, and I used a bunch of stuff that was already in my fridge, so a win for the pantry-clearing effort, too.

Not all foods are pretty, but that doesn't make them taste bad.