Vegan Nacho Cheese

The last few days have not exactly gone as planned. And by that I mean that they were a total mess. Wednesday, the baby ended up with a fever, I had a doctor's appointment of the unpleasant feminine variety, and I had to take the baby to a last minute doctor's appointment. I also completely forgot about a board meeting, so I had to sort of re-plan my evening. Then, after the pediatrician appointment, I had to go to the pharmacy, drop off the baby, and head straight to my meeting.

It should come as no surprise, then, that dinner sort of fell by the wayside. I had every intention of making the chicken wings so that I could just be using them up and getting rid of the last remnants of meat from our freezer. Yet, by the end of the evening, we couldn't be bothered. We ordered in Mediterranean food from a local restaurant, Elia's, instead.

Vegetarian (but actually vegan) combination plate.

In fact, if I'm being perfectly honest about it, dinner has been a bit of an after-thought the last few days. Thursday, I had a funeral viewing to go to. Tonight, we went to Costco after work while my parents watched the sick baby for us. This entire week has been a bit of a wash for me, food-wise. It could have been worse, but it also could have been exponentially better.

Here's the thing: things are getting busy and I feel a bit on edge about the fact that I now have less food options to fall back on when they do because we're going vegan. It's easy to stop and get a burger. It's easy to pick out literally any restaurant and get chicken or some other form of meat. It's ridiculously hard in northern Indiana to find vegan options on a menu. I went to a restaurant with my parents this week and everything had meat or dairy. There wasn't even a salad that was free of meat. The sad thing is that this is not unusual. This is how it is in our area.

So, this evening, I just felt like I needed a few things. First, I needed a snack because I was still hungry after the take-out Chinese dinner we had with my family. Second, I needed to prove to myself that I could still have good snacks in a shorter amount of time without really feeling the sacrifice. In that spirit, I decided to give a try to a recipe that we found on a YouTube channel we follow called Hot for Food. Tonight, I made vegan nacho cheese.

Feel free to ignore my terrible cropping and the mostly empty baby bottle.

That's right, vegan nacho cheese. I'm not going to get into the specifics of the recipe, but you can find the video here. The video also contains a link to their website, where you can find the written recipe if you don't feel like watching the video (or click here if you're really lazy).

I was pleasantly surprised at how delicious this recipe happens to be. I will say, first of all, that it does not taste like the nacho cheese sauce that it looks like. It has some cheesiness to the flavor, but I wouldn't say that it tastes like cheese. But then, who really expects vegan recipes or products to actually taste like cheese? I just think this happens to be a really delicious sauce with some cheese-like undertones.

I think that the reason this cheese sauce is so good actually has a lot more to do with the jalapenos and their brine than it does the nutritional yeast. It wouldn't be nearly as good without the jalapenos. The texture of it, especially when pouring it out of the blender, was actually surprisingly cheese-like. The mouthfeel was a bit less smooth than it looked, but I think that may have more to do with the fact that I don't have a Vitamix than it does anything else.

We bought some multigrain tortilla chips at Costco tonight from a company called Food Should Taste Good that I had with the nacho cheese sauce. Those chips were also surprisingly good. They have flax seeds and sunflower seeds, so the flavor is a bit more nutty. Most importantly, the paired really well with the nacho cheese. Tony, the notorious cheese-hater, actually tried them together and liked them.

Ultimately, I think I accomplished what I set out to do tonight. I wanted to create something delicious in a shorter amount of time and prove to myself, after a week of crappy eating and disappointment in my food, that I would still be able to eat tasty, easy things while vegan. I think, including time to cook the potatoes and carrots, that this nacho cheese took about 15 minutes to prepare. It also made quite a lot of cheese sauce. I don't even think I ate a quarter of what it made, so there's still quite a bit left.

It took me until Friday night, but I managed to redeem myself with just a simple, satisfying snack. I feel like I can do this again after having spent the last few days worrying about how I'll be able to find things to eat that don't just consist of raw vegetables or scornful glances from meat-eaters. After all, one cannot subsist on judgement alone.