Snow day kitchen experiment

Since I had an unexpected day off, I thought I would try a recipe I've been wanting to make out of my Veganomicon cookbook. (Moskowitz, Isa Chandra. Veganomicon: The Ultimate Vegan Cookbook. c2007)

Last week I made a Macaroni and Cheese with Cauliflower recipe out of my Real Simple magazine for Richard. So today I made a vegan mac and cheese recipe, "Mac Daddy" from my new cookbook.

It's a two-part recipe. The first step is to make the "cheese" sauce which is a broth-based sauce with nutritional yeast. I've just started using recipes with nutritional yeast now that I know that they sell it at Raisin Rack in the vitamin area. Last week I made a vegan lasagna from Vegetarian Times, which used the yeast. It was really good, but too rich for my taste. (And kindof a lot of work!) I didn't take a picture of the dish when I made it, so here's a pic from my magazine. Believe it or not, mine looked just as good!

The "cheesy" sauce is really not that cheesy, it's more like a butter sauce or thick savory gravy. It looks a little cheesy, though, so it gets points for that! It tastes really good, but I don't think I would substitute the sauce in recipes like nachos, like recommended in the cookbook.

Here's a picture of the "cheesy" sauce:

Then I crumble tofu into a casserole dish with some olive oil, lemon juice, and salt, then combined the macaroni (I substituted rotini since I used up my macaroni last week on the real stuff!), and the cheesy sauce. Here's how it looked before it baked:

Then it bakes for 30 minutes, and sits for 20 more minutes. It gets nice and bubbly. I'm thinking I should put some breadcrumbs on the top since that might make it look a little prettier.
Mmmm...Comfort food on a snowy day!