VeganMoFo Day 26 - Winner, Winner Mac & Cheese Dinner

I'm not sure if it's the veggies I chose, the fact that I tripled one of the ingredients, or the one ingredient that made this recipe for mac & cheese different from all the other mac & cheese recipes out there, but this was the best of all the mac & cheese dinners I've made.

Macaroni and Oaty Cheese
SERVINGS: 8
PREPARATION TIME: 15 MINUTES
COOKING TIME: 30 MINUTES

2 cups water
1/2 cup quick-cooking oatmeal flakes
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 tablespoon onion powder
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 4-ounce jar diced pimientos
1 pound uncooked elbow macaroni

Place all ingredients, except the macaroni, in a blender jar and process
for several minutes until very smooth and well blended. Pour into a saucepan,
cook, and stir until thickened.

Preheat the oven to 350°F.

Cook the macaroni until just tender, then drain. Place the macaroni in
a covered baking dish, pour the cheese sauce over the top, and mix thoroughly.

Bake, covered, for 30 minutes.

The McDougall Program for A Healthy Heart
John McDougall, M.D. and Mary McDougall
(1996), ISBN: 0-452-27266-1 
page 349

I had to buy some quick oats. I had plenty of old fashioned, even 2 different packages of steel-cut, but no quick around the house. So now I do, for this recipe and some of the fruity dessert recipes.

I'm using a nutritional yeast brand that I'm not happy with right now. I ran out of the nooch I used to get from The Mail Order Catalog a while ago, and rather than pay as much in shipping as I did for the nooch itself, I bought some Bob's Red Mill yeast. When that local source dried up, I ordered what I thought were yeast "mini-flakes" from VitaCost, but turned out to be Frontier brand nutritional yeast powder. Not one flake in the whole bag. I used it once or twice at breakfast (grits and a tofu scramble) and it didn't taste all that great, so I decided I needed my tried and true Red Star yeast back. The local HFS recently started selling this, but in tiny 1-cup plastic shell-packs. Not only was the price too high but think of all that plastic! The last time I bought it from The Mail Order Catalog I saw that they just slapped their own sticker on the sealed bag over the Bulk Foods label, so this time I went directly to Bulk Foods, where the price was the same but shipping costs way less. Within 24 hours my 5-pound bag of nooch was on the way via UPS and is now in my food storage pantry, waiting for me to finish the other nooch I have before opening this big bag of golden flakes. Ah, the comfortable feeling of knowing I have enough nooch to last the upcoming winter months!

But for this recipe, I used the Frontier brand powder, and I used the full 1/4 cup the recipe called for, although I once read that if you use powder instead of flakes, use half the amount. Since I usually use a half cup in cheese sauce recipes anyway, I stuck with the quarter cup as written.

Onion powder is the ingredient I accidentally used three times as much of, but that's another ingredient I usually use more of than a recipe calls for and didn't think much of the mistake.

Again, instead of a wasteful 4-ounce jar of pimientos I used a half cup of roasted red peppers from a large jar.

For the pasta, once again it was store brand whole wheat, but twists this time.

While the pasta was cooking, I microwaved up some frozen veggies I picked up in Walmart last week. It's Bird's Eye Normandy Blend and comes in this gigantic 72 ounce bag. I used some last week when I bought it, but the rest of this bag was taking up about a third of my total freezer space, so I cooked up the rest of the bag, about 3/4 or more of the total amount on the label, which filled my 8-cup Pyrex. When cooked, it really shrunk down to a bit less than 4 cups. 

When the pasta was cooked & drained, veggies were nuked,  and the cheese sauce was blended, I mixed everything together in the pasta pot for a good mixing, then dumped it all into my glass roasting pan, shook some whole wheat bread crumbs on top, covered it with the non-stick foil, and popped it in the oven for the 30 minutes. I didn't bother to pre-cook the sauce as directed.

before the breadcrumbs

It looks just like every other pan full of mac & cheese I've ever made, but the difference was at the table, on the fork, in our mouths. It may be the choice of veggies - this mix has not just cauliflower, carrots and broccoli, some pieces up to 6 inches long, but also both zucchini and yellow squash. It may be the triple onion powder. Could it really be the oats instead of the usual white beans, tofu, potato or even cashews? It had a nice little hint of sweetness to it, yet the taste of each vegetable still stood out on its own.

I'm going to have to make this again using different vegetables to know for sure if it's the sauce or the veggies, or even which brand of nooch I used. I'm hoping it's the oats, though, because they're more convenient and cheaper than all the other thickeners I've used in these trial recipes, and something I always have on hand. Now that my husband's appetite is back to normal he'll be wanting his mac & cheese weekly again, so I'll find out soon.