BLACKENED TOMATO CASHEW SAUCE - from The Plantpower Way
Prep time: 15 minutes (end to end)
Clean up time: 5 minutes
Serves: 2-4
Stored in fridge 3-4 days
Welcome to my first ever recipe breakdown! I like to clean as I go in the kitchen and to have most of the dishes done before I sit down to eat. This means I love recipes that use minimal dishes (I sometimes feel like I spend my life doing dishes!) and have very little clean up required. This also means I’m a bit of a slower cook and find recipe times are often way off. These recipe breakdowns aim to be more accurate with timing, especially if you are someone that can struggle in the kitchen like me! The prep times indicated are from end to end - starting with a clear bench through to getting as much clean up done with all ingredients etc. put away. Clean up time indicates how long it takes to get the dishes done afterwards, not including drying time.
With a tiny human often tugging on my legs, recipes need to be quick and simple to make it into our weekly rotation. The Plantpower Way’s Blackened Tomato Cashew Sauce ticks all the boxes, with minimal preparation, cooking, and cleanup. It is also versatile and can be used as a base for many dishes by adding a few more ingredients. When I made the sauce for this blog post, I used it plain over pasta for dinner one night and bulked the leftovers out with chickpeas and shredded kale for dinner the second night. It actually tasted better the second night after the flavours had had some time to marinate. Another great thing about this recipe is you can be quite loose with the quantities of ingredients and it still ends up tasting amazing.
BLACKENED TOMATO CASHEW SAUCE
A rich, hearty, homestyle tomato sauce that really creates a comforting meal in minutes. Serving a healthy dose of lycopene from the tomatoes and omega-3 fats from the cashews, this simple sauce is delightful. It’s almost completely raw and takes all of three minutes to prepare. It’s great over pasta or as a soup. But we use it as a delicious sauce over our Aromatic Country-Style Tempeh Loaf (page 233), and it smothers our Vegan Lasagna (page 236) as well. Learn to make it by heart. It will leave you wondering why you ever bought that jar of tomato sauce.
Ingredients
1 pound cherry tomatoes
1/4 red bell pepper
1/4 cup raw cashews
3 dehydrated sun-dried tomatoes
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon vegan butter spread (i.e., Earth Balance)
1 small carrot
Celtic sea salt, to taste
Preparation
1. In a cast-iron skillet or wok, blacken the tomatoes whole over high heat with no oil.
2. Remove the seeds and stem of the bell pepper. Blacken in the same pan using no oil.
3. Transfer the slightly blackened tomatoes and bell pepper to a Vitamix or high-powered blender and add all the remaining ingredients except the sea salt. The sun-dried tomatoes will add a fair amount of salt, so blend first and then add sea salt to taste.
Ingredient Tips:
-This is a great recipe to make during summer when punnets of cherry tomatoes are on special. The recipe calls for one pound of tomatoes which is about two punnets or 450gms, but you don’t need to be too precise.
-There is no need to peel the carrot but if you don’t have a high powered blender (we have been through few in our house) then chop the carrot up quite small to help with blending the sauce smooth.
-We use dry sun-dried tomatoes by Ceres but they can be hard to find. If using sun-dried tomatoes from a jar with oil, I would then skip the olive oil.
-We don’t always have vegan butter in the fridge (any plant based spread is fine, for example, Olivani) and the sauce still tastes great without it. Don’t stress about not having this ingredient.
-I’ve made the sauce with no oil or vegan butter and the cashews still gave it more than enough creamy texture. You could also add a few more cashews if you were skipping the other two ingredients.
-I rarely ever add salt since our toddler will be eating it, and most of the time it doesn’t even need it. Adding salt could help with the flavours if you are still in the early days of transitioning to a plant-based diet.
Preparation & Clean Up Tips:
The great thing about this sauce is that there really isn’t much to making it so the preparation is minimal. If we are having it over pasta I put the pasta water on to boil first before I do anything else so it is ready at the same time as the sauce. And you can’t really go wrong with the rest of the instructions, just add to the blender once the tomatoes and capsicum are blackened in a hot pan. Clean up is also a breeze - there should only be a chopping board, knife, blender and pan. The pan usually takes the longest to clean up as the tomatoes may split and burn onto the pan a bit. Nothing that a bit of scrubbing or soaking can't fix.
We usually have the sauce over wholemeal pasta or soba noodles with some baby spinach. It can also be used as a base for a bean, chickpea, or veggie stew. Without adding other ingredients it only serves our family of three (two adults and a toddler) for one night. The recipe could easily be doubled and bulked out to last longer. We usually cook every second night and make enough to last for two meals so the crazy dinner time hours aren’t quite so crazy.
Nourishment:
The sauce also packs a lot of nutritional punch. I try not to focus on macro nutrients, if you eat a varied, plant-based, whole food diet you will get what you need. Instead I look to the nourishing micro nutrients in my meals. Tomatoes are a great source of fibre (97% of Americans are deficient in this nutrient!), vitamin C, K and folate. They also contain high levels of lycopene which is a strong antioxidant. Cashews are also rich in vitamins and minerals. These include omega-3 fats, vitamins E, K, B6, and minerals zinc, magnesium, iron and selenium. The meal may just seem like a sauce over pasta but it is full of amazing nourishment!
The Plantpower Way
The Plantpower Way is a fantastic starter volume for plant-based cooking and features many simple recipes like the Blackened Tomato Cashew Sauce. Our last few family celebrations have used recipes from this book, the vegan lasagne is always a hit. The book is a great starter guide to plant-based living and includes guides, tips and advice, along with many tasty recipes.
