RAW- "Cheese" Sauce

Yes, you heard right, a cheese sauce that's raw.  Again, inspiration had hit me to make this sauce, well more like a thick, cheese-like cream.  Ok I'm probably straying you away aren't I? But trust me, it's quite delicious and on top of that, it's vegan, paleo, and husband-approved haha.  I stumbled upon this recipe because my husband was hungry for dinner but he wanted something other than the usual healthy dish.  And who said, beggers can't be choosers. :P JK  Even though I wanted to reach for that back-up Velveeta mac-n-cheese, I instead started googling.  I came upon a couple of raw recipes for mac and cheese and the one I took to liking was the Rawtarian's mac and cheese.  I added a few ingredients to make it my own and also to please my husband's palate.

Oh btw, I keep putting quotation marks on cheese because it's not really cheese.  It base is cashews.  My favorite nut, by the way. :P

Broccoli and RAW "Cheese" Sauce

 

Ingredients: (For the cheese sauce)

2 cups of raw, organic cashews

3/4 cup Water - added 1/4 cup of water during processing

1 tablespoon Lemon

1 teaspoon Sea Salt

1/3 cup Nutritional Yeast

Dash Cayenne pepper (optional)

Couple dashes of Garlic powder

LOTS of Black pepper 

Ok if you have a Vitamix, well you're in luck, this will be easy for you.  But for myself, I don't have one nor do I feel like I need to spend that kind of money for it because I probably won't use it as much.  So instead, I blended everything in my food processor. 

PREP: Before I started making this sauce, I had soaked the cashews overnight which helps in blending but also beneficial in SOO many ways for the digestion. (Just google benefits of soaking nuts)

 

I submersed the cashews in purified water- room temperatured- and covered with a (clean) dish cloth overnight.  You don't have to soak the nuts overnight, you can soak them 2-3 hours in advance.  Once you're done doing that, rinse thoroughly and throw them in the food processor. 

Pour in the 3/4 cup of water (hold off on the added water until processing) and pulse a couple times until you're comfortable enough to fully process it.  I stopped occasionally to clean the sides of the container and to allow air into the bowl with a spatula.  As you continue to process, this is the time to drizzle in the additional water - I put an additional 1/4 cup of water, but you can put as much as you want as long it stays in that thick-like consistency.

(it should look like this as the final product - see how thick it is)

 Once fully processed, I then added the remaining ingredients- nutritional yeast, salt, lemon, cayenne pepper, garlic powder, and black pepper.  Then you're done!  Keep tasting and adding to your liking.

Since I still wanted to keep this a healthy dish, I made my husband eat it with steamed broccoli and cauliflower hehe He was kinda sad and hesitant but once he tried it, he was AMAZED!  He even threw away the Velveeta mac-n-cheese in the trash!! Yah. Crazy! haha

Ok i'm done here.  I gotta shower now because I just got done working out and tanning.  Can we say GTB- Gym, Tan, Blogging! HA!

- Abigail