Hey guys, welcome back to Sarah's Vegan Kitchen! Today, we're getting back to basics. We're going to be making three easy vegan recipes for beginners. So whether you are going plant-based or someone in your life is going vegan and you just want to support them, these are three vegan meal ideas I think everyone should have in their arsenal. They are simple, delicious, and you can just make them time and time again and they're always a hit. Alright, recipe number 1! I feel like making this is like a rite of passage for new vegans: Chickpea salad, also known as vegan tuna salad. Growing up, I was just obsessed with all mayo-based salad sandwiches - egg salad, chicken salad, tuna salad. My mom used to pack those for me in my lunch and I would always look forward to those days so when I went vegan I definitely had to find a way to recreate those, stat. Chickpeas are the key ingredient to our vegan tuna salad. Drain your chickpeas, you can save the water from the can, it's also known as aquafaba. to use in all sorts of cool stuff. You can use it as an egg replacer in vegan cookies, use it to make meringue, or even vegan mayonnaise . Let me know if you're interested in seeing a video about different applications for this. Give your chickpeas a good rinse and shake off as much water as you can. Then add them to a bowl and roughly mash them. I find the back of a fork works just fine here but you can also use a potato masher or even pulse them a few times in your food processor
until they're crumbly. I feel like tuna salad's one of those
things where every family has their own special recipe and these are the things I
always used to add to mine before I went vegan. I love to add lots of fresh celery to add a nice
refreshing crunch. I just give it a fine dice. Then some thinly sliced scallions. You can actually
use any kind of onion here: yellow, white, red... And again, just cut them nice and fine because my
personal pet peeve is biting into a big piece of raw onion. And optionally, to cut the sharpness
of the raw onion even further, you can rinse them in a little bit of cool water. Now into our mashed chickpeas we'll add about
a third a cup vegan mayonnaise. The classic Follow Your Heart
veg...Vee-ga-naise? Vege-uh-naise? is still my favorite. If you're trying to make your vegan tuna salad a little
lighter and healthier, you can reduce the mayo or even experiment with substituting in something
like plain, unsweetened vegan yogurt or even mashed avocado. I also love to add either chopped
dill pickles or dill relish to my vegan tuna salad. And I also add in lots of Dijon mustard. Now in with our diced celery and sliced green onions. Finish it off with some cracked black pepper
and salt. And optional, but recommended, just to brighten up all the flavors, I add the juice of
half of a lemon. Give everything a good mix and adjust everything to taste. This recipe is one
that you can really make your own. If you are missing the fishy flavor of classic tuna salad,
you can even add in a few teaspoons of seaweed. You can buy it in flakes or make your own by just
blitzing a few sheets of nori in your blender. I have some of this Trader Joe's furikake so that's
what I like to use to keep things easy. Now it's time to assemble the most delicious vegan tuna
salad sandwich. I like to use fluffy white bread because it reminds me of the tuna sandwiches
my mom used to pack in my lunch growing up. I also add fresh sliced tomatoes and fresh lettuce. *happy eating noises* This also makes the most amazing vegan tuna melts. Just heap your chickpea salad onto a nice,
rustic slice of bread, top it with tomatoes, some vegan cheddar, some pickled jalapeños, and broil
it until the cheese is beautiful and melted. Okay so the next recipe is one that really
throws me back to the beginning of my vegan YouTube days, like late 2015, early 2016. I made these all the time: it's cauliflower buffalo wings. I think I literally made
these once or twice a week, every week, for a year. They're actually addictive.
I think this is the first recipe that put me onto cauliflower. I really never purchased
or cooked with cauliflower before this. This is just one of those crowd-pleasing beginner
vegan recipes that I never get tired of. Pick out a medium to large head of cauliflower. Remove the leaves of the base
and then cut the cauliflower into florets. I usually go with medium sized florets
but you can also cut them smaller if you want more like little buffalo cauliflower bites. This cauliflower here was actually a little on the small side,
but we are looking for anywhere between four and six cups of cauliflower florets
for the amount of batter in this recipe. Now we're going to make a simple spiced batter. Into a large bowl we'll add about 3/4 cup of
flour. I use all-purpose but you can also use a gluten-free, all-purpose flour blend or something
like chickpea flour as well. Then a few teaspoons of garlic powder,
some onion powder, and paprika. Occasionally I'll also add in a tablespoon or two of nutritional yeast, that's really delicious too. Then season with some fresh cracked black pepper to preference and about half a teaspoon of salt. Whisk together your dry ingredients and then we're going to add in some unsweetened plain
plant milk. We usually always have soy milk in our fridge but really any kind will work and you can
just even use plain water if you're in a pinch. Whisk together your buffalo cauliflower batter,
we're looking for something just slightly thinner than pancake batter and you can add in an extra
splash of water or a little extra flour as needed to get the right consistency. Next we will take our
florets and transfer those to the mixing bowl with the batter and we're going to toss our cauliflower,
get it coated. It's okay if the cauliflower isn't 100% covered as long as the batter is pretty evenly
distributed. Line a baking tray with a silicone mat
or some parchment. If you don't have either
of those, you're definitely going to want to grease your baking sheet because the batter will
stick otherwise. Arrange your battered cauliflower on the tray, just try to leave a little extra
space between them so that they crisp up evenly on all sides. Now we're going to pop them into a
preheated 400 degree oven and bake for 20 minutes. At this point you'll
pull them out and give them a flip so that the batter cooks up evenly. And we'll pop them back into the oven for another
15 to 20 minutes or until the batter is a nice deep golden brown. Just before you take your
cauliflower out of the oven go ahead and melt a few tablespoons of vegan butter in a large bowl. You can skip the butter if you want to keep your Buffalo cauliflower oil free, but I like to add it. Whisk it together with your favorite vegan-friendly Buffalo sauce. My go-to's Frank's
because it's easy to find, it's affordable. Don't worry about the natural butter flavoring
because it is plant-based. And if you keep your hot sauce in the fridge, I recommend popping it in the microwave really quickly before you toss your cauliflower in it. Also, Buffalo sauce is the classic
but you can use literally any sauce you like. I have tossed these with barbecue sauce,
teriyaki, sweet chili sauce. I've even done like, a bang bang cauliflower with equal parts vegan
mayo and sriracha, it's all delicious. Okay, let me know, leave a comment down below: are you on team ranch or team bleu cheese dressing
for dipping your Buffalo wings? I like both,
but I think I'm a ranch girl. Eric picked up this Daiya blue cheese dressing which is pretty good,
but I'd actually recommend, if you can, going and finding the Follow Your Heart blue cheese crumbles. They're super convincing, so maybe make your own dressing with that and some vegan mayo. I threw together a really simple cashew-based
vegan ranch dressing with some fresh lemon juice, onion and garlic powder,
and dried herbs. And these are super addictive, I usually never
have leftovers, but if you do you can heat them back up in the oven or in an air fryer at
350 degrees for just about 10 minutes or so. Okay, this last recipe is another one and
that really throws me back to the beginning of my YouTube days because I would make this
all the time. It's a simple vegan cheese sauce
with a base of cashews, potatoes, and carrots. Comes together super easy, you just need a sauce pot and a blender and it makes like, a huge batch. You can cut it down if you need to. But I like to just make the huge batch and I have cheese sauce to use in
different recipes and as a dip throughout the week. We're going to start out by peeling and cubing
a small potato, preferably a little smaller than this one. We're also going to chop up a carrot
and we're going to boil those for about 10 to 15 minutes or however long till the potatoes are tender. And these are going to help give the vegan cheese sauce
a volume and a nice thick velvety texture. Now we're going to measure out some milk. We usually have soy milk but in general any
unsweetened non-dairy milk should work fine and if you don't have any in your fridge, you
can even just use plain water. I just usually like to add milk to give the sauce some extra body
and to boost the protein content a little. In the meantime, let's measure out our seasonings. Most important ingredient is nutritional yeast, which is going to make our vegan cheese sauce taste
nice and creamy and savory and it also has a lot of nutrition including some B vitamins and a
fair amount of protein. Then we also add in onion powder, garlic powder, and paprika to give our vegan
cheese sauce some extra umami. Now we have about a cup of raw cashews
that we have soaked for several hours. This will make our vegan cheese sauce extra creamy. I do have a few possible substitutions in
the recipe which is linked in the description. We're going to drain the cashews, give them a good
rinse, and add them to the pitcher of our blender. Now add in your cooked potatoes and carrots and
reserve that starchy cooking liquid just in case we need to thin out our sauce later. Plop in a few tablespoons of vegan butter,
you can leave this out if you want an oil-free sauce option
but I feel like it makes the sauce taste and feel more like real cheese. Then we add in a cup
of water, as well as our milk and our spices and we blend until it's as velvety and smooth
as we can get it. Then we realized we forgot to add the lemon juice, very important ingredient to give our
vegan cheese sauce that tanginess. Now depending on how starchy your potato was you might need to add a little bit of extra liquid to thin out your sauce, and I like to use that reserved cooking
liquid, just blend it in as needed until your vegan cheese sauce has that
perfect, pourable creamy consistency. Now this recipe makes about
four cups of cheese sauce so quite a bit, and here are
two of our favorite ways to enjoy it. Number one: make some mac and cheese. Cook your favorite pasta till it's al dente,
then add it back into a pot with some of the vegan cheese
sauce and just cook until it's heated through. It's super creamy and delicious and my favorite part
is that it doesn't give me a stomach ache the way that real mac and cheese used to do or the way
that large quantities of processed vegan cheese do. And our second favorite way to enjoy this is
by making nacho cheese sauce. I like to heat it up on the stovetop with some diced tomatoes or Rotel,
a handful of chopped pickled nacho jalapeños or even some diced green chilies from a can, some
ground cumin and chili powder, and a few shakes of whatever hot sauce we're currently loving. Marie Sharps is an all-time favorite of ours. We warm it up and top it with a little bit of smoked
paprika and fresh cilantro and it makes the most amazing dip for tortilla chips. Or it's delicious if you want to make a
big platter of nachos vegan taco meat, some black olives, chopped onions,
guacamole, pico de gallo. So that's it!
Those are our three easy vegan recipes for beginners. You can check the description box for links to all of the recipes over on our blog,
sarahsvegankitchen.com. Hopefully this video inspires you, helps you out. Maybe you can share it with
someone in your life who is trying to incorporate more plant-based meals in their day-to-day. And I will see you in my next video. Bye! [Music]
