Easy Vegan Lasagna (Overnight)

Easy Vegan Lasagna Overnight PinThis overnight Easy Vegan Lasagna was inspired by our other overnight Vegan Gluten Free Lasagna recipe, but with a few changes to make things easier and cheaper. However, you can mix and match the main ingredients depending on your taste preferences and the amount of work you want to put into it.

Lentil Ground “Beef”

Let’s start with the “meat” mixture. Our original recipe uses Beyond Meat Beefy Crumbles as the meat substitute. This meat sub is tasty, but it’s not available everywhere and it’s also a processed food with added canola and sunflower oil. If you’re an oil-free eater, this won’t do.

Amelia made us a delicious Vegan Lentil Loaf awhile back, so that gave me the idea to use lentils as the ground beef substitute. And they work great! I cook them in our pressure cooker, but you can also boil them on the stove.

Our pressure cooker instructions say to cook them for 9 minutes, but we’re at high altitude so I cook them for 12 minutes. They need to be slightly overcooked and a little mushy so you can mash them into a ground beef texture. Then I stir fry them without oil or liquid in a large skillet to smash them up more and dry them out a bit to give them more of a ground beef look.

Our pressure cooker instructions also call for 1 tbsp of vegetable oil to keep the lentils from frothing too much and clogging the steam vent, but we never do this and haven’t had any issues. To keep this recipe oil-free, we recommend skipping the oil. You just may need to clean your pressure cooker steam vent more often.

Tofu Ricotta

Now for the Tofu Ricotta. Our original recipe uses Cashew Ricotta made from our Vegan Cashew Cream recipe. While this is less processed than tofu, cashews are also a lot more expensive. You can buy a package of organic tofu for less than $2, but it’ll cost you about $8 to buy enough cashews for this recipe. If you’re soy-free, you can swap the Tofu Ricotta with the Cashew Ricotta.

This recipe has quite a bit of salt so if you have heart disease or high blood pressure, please omit the salt. Salt substitutes are also best to be avoided if you have these health issues or kidney disease.

Tomato Sauce

Now for the sauce. Our original lasagna recipe uses our homemade spaghetti sauce for the lasagna sauce. This sauce is delicious, but it also takes quite a bit of extra ingredients and time to prepare. To keep things cheap and easy, we’re using jarred of spaghetti sauce in this new recipe. We recommend using a fat-free variety like Prego’s Lower Calorie Light Smart Traditional sauce. But you can always make your own sauce from scratch if you want to.

The Easy Vegan Lasagna Part

Finally, we made our original recipe gluten-free by using rice lasagna noodles, but we just used regular wheat noodles for this recipe. We prefer a whole-grain noodle, but those options are limited here in Ecuador. To make it gluten-free, just swap the noodles for your favorite gluten-free variety.

Since this recipe doesn’t use vegan cheese (which is mostly oil), it has more than 100 fewer calories per serving than our original recipe. It’s also oil-free since we’re using lentils instead of the beefy crumbles.

Easy Vegan Lasagna

Like our original recipe, this one is also “overnight” so you don’t have to cook the noodles. It only takes about 15 to 20 minutes of actual work to prepare this Easy Vegan Lasagna, which is nothing compared to a conventional, non-overnight lasagna. It makes 8 servings so you’ll have lots of leftovers (unless you’re feeding the whole family).

It’s also a great option to take to a friend’s house since you prepare it the day before and just pop it in the oven for about an hour before you’re ready to eat.

Enjoy with a simple side salad and some Vegan Garlic Bread. Save some sauce and heat it up on the stove to pour over the lasagna just before you serve it. We didn’t do that this time, but we will the next time we make it.


Vegan Breakfast Burrito

Vegan Breakfast Burrito PinThis Vegan Breakfast Burrito recipe is delicious and filling. If you prepare the tofu scramble and potatoes the night before, all you’ll need to do is reheat them and assemble the burrito for a quick and easy healthy plant-based breakfast.

To make our delicious breakfast burrito, we combined our Easy Tofu Scramble recipe and our Oven Roasted Red Potatoes recipe and wrapped them up in a tortilla. We used flour tortillas since they make better wraps, but you can also use corn tortillas if you avoid gluten. Eat them open-faced, tostada-style if you can’t wrap them without splitting the tortilla.

Our roasted potatoes use a little olive oil to get them to come out crispy and prevent them from sticking to the baking sheet. However, if you prefer to avoid oil altogether, you can roast them without oil but they might be a little mushy and may stick to the pan.

We’ve tried several different oil-free roasted potato recipes and none came out well. That could be due to the high altitude in Denver. They either came out mushy or burned. We’d love to hear your experiences roasting without oil in the comments below.

This is one of our favorite plant-based breakfast recipes! You don’t have to give up your delicious breakfast burritos just because you eat a plant-based diet!


Easy Tofu Scramble

Easy Tofu Scramble PinIf you’re in a hurry or if you need an Easy Tofu Scramble for your Vegan Sardou, this is the perfect recipe. It only takes a couple of minutes to prepare once you’ve pressed the tofu and it’s a great substitute for any scrambled egg recipe.

Contrary to what the dairy industry will have you believe, tofu and soy are very healthy foods. They’ve been consumed in asian countries for millennia and are strongly associated with positive health outcomes.

Most of the negative publicity soy gets was created by the dairy industry to protect their profits from soy milk. All of those myths have since been proven false, but that doesn’t keep them from being perpetuated.

My favorite myth is that the estrogen (actually phytoestrogen) found in soy will cause gynecomastia (aka man-boobs or moobs). In psychology, this is called projection, which occurs when “humans defend themselves against their own unconscious impulses or qualities (both positive and negative) by denying their existence in themselves while attributing them to others.”

Phytoestrogen is different than mammal estrogen. Phytoestrogens have been shown to help prevent or reduce diabetes, several forms of cancer, blood cholesterol and cardiovascular disease.

Plant estrogen doesn’t behave the same way as mammal estrogen, but you know what has loads of mammal estrogen? Cow’s milk. Unlike phytoestrogens, cow estrogen found in dairy looks just like human estrogen, which may actually cause moobs, as well as male infertility, several forms of cancer, osteoporosis, erectile disfunction, and heart disease. Dairy also exposes us to toxic chemicals that make their way up the food chain and get stored in the fat in milk.

When the dairy industry started the myth that phytoestrogens cause moobs, they were actually projecting the real negative qualities of dairy onto a naturally healthy food, soy. But when a competitor like soy milk threatens your bottom line, you do whatever it takes to protect the interests of your investors even if that means funding false or misleading studies, as well as organizations that promote them.

Rant over…

Our regular Tofu Scramble recipe has a higher nutritional content because it’s loaded with mushrooms, hearty greens and colorful bell peppers. If you have the time and ingredients, you might like that even more.

Easy Tofu Scramble Instructional Video


Tofu Breakfast Sandwich w/ Avocado

Tofu Breakfast Sandwich PinYou can eat this delicious, high protein and nutrient rich Tofu Breakfast Sandwich naked (without the bread), as an open-face sandwich or as a full sandwich. This is a great, high energy way to start your day. Plus, it makes leftovers that you can quickly heat up for your busy morning schedule.

We originally made this recipe with an english muffin, but it’s hard to find those without oil, milk and/or eggs so we switched it to a whole grain bread sandwich. Whole grains are healthier anyway.

The bread in our pictures is a whole wheat bread with chia seeds. We get it from a local baker here in Cuenca, Ecuador called ArteSana Panadería y Pastelería. They aren’t a vegan baker, but they do make delicious vegan bread.

We like to eat this as a breakfast sandwich, but you can eat it for lunch or dinner, too. We used to put vegan butter on our sandwiches until we realized how much oil and how many calories vegan butter has. Now we either buy really high quality bread that doesn’t need anything added to it, or we use a nut butter, jam or hummus, depending on what we’re eating. Some of our Vegan Hummus or White Bean Dip or Spread would go great on this tofu breakfast sandwich.

Tofu Breakfast Sandwich

This breakfast meal has 16 grams of protein, 8 grams of fiber, 19% RDA Iron, 50% Vitamin C and 14% Calcium. Pair it with a bowl of fresh or frozen fruit and this makes one filling breakfast. I can’t think of a better way to start your day than with a nutrient dense tofu breakfast sandwich like this.

If you’re on a weight loss plan, you can skip the avocado to reduce the fat content and calories.


Chocolate Tofu Pudding

Chocolate Tofu PuddingThis Chocolate Tofu Pudding is a protein rich, chocolate peanut butter tofu pudding dessert. It’s been a favorite of mine for years and only takes a few minutes to make. You will need a blender, though.

Before switching to a vegan diet, this was the only recipe of mine that used tofu. Looking back, it’s odd that the only time I used tofu was in a creamy dessert. Now we cook with it all the time. Tofu doesn’t have much flavor of its own so it tastes like whatever you’re cooking.

We pour the pudding into small glass serving bowls, but you can also use small glasses or sealable containers. It’s best to eat them within 2 days or they get a tough pudding film on the top.


Tofu Scramble

Tofu ScrambleMy first attempt at a Tofu Scramble was a combination of recipes that I found online. Turning a block of tofu into “scrambled eggs” isn’t exactly common sense for someone who’s never done it before so I needed some help.

Some of the recipes were good, but the instructions were really lacking. The cooks who wrote them take for granted that new plant-based eaters need everything explained. That’s what I’ll aim to do here. If anything is confusing, please let me know so I can fix it.

If you serve this delicious tofu scramble to someone and don’t tell them it’s tofu, I doubt they’ll know. It looks and tastes just like scrambled eggs. I like to put some salsa on mine with a side of oven roasted red potatoes and a glass of unsweetened cashew milk. Very tasty.

The turmeric is the key to the scrambled eggs color. A half a teaspoon is all you need for a standard block of tofu. Any more and the tofu scramble is too yellow. Any less and it’s not yellow enough.

Indian or Himalayan Black Salt is another vegan trick ingredient to simulate an egg taste and smell. It contains sulfur and actually smells like hard boiled eggs. Indian Black Salt is different than Hawaiian Black Salt or Black Lava Salt so you can’t interchange the two.
