VBR takes it to the kitchen

This past weekend I had an amazing cooking lesson with my vegan gal pal and fellow blogger, Vegyogini, who happens to be a wizard in the kitchen. We picked a couple recipes from Vegan Planet, which by the way is a must-have cookbook. It's "The ultimate guide to meat-free, dairy-free and egg-free cooking that everyone will enjoy." It's a gigantor book and it's packed with all kinds of invaluable vegan tidbits, info on nutrition and scrumptious recipes. With chapters like "New World Pizza," "Dessert Heaven" and "Love at First Bite," you know you're in for an awesome meal.
I had been wanting to make Mexican food since forever so pursuing an enchilada recipe was a no-brainer. As far as dessert goes, I had a a whole bag of fresh organic limes in my fridge so I thought a key lime cheesecake was in order.

Black Bean and Sweet Potato Enchiladas
Aside from the 30 minutes it took to chop and cook the sweet potatoes, this was a relatively quick recipe to whip up. We also modified the the recipe ever so slightly. We used corn tortillas instead of flour tortillas and we used store-bought enchilada sauce from Trader Joe's instead of salsa. I'm in love with TJ's enchilada sauce. It's finger lickin' good!
The photo above does a good job of displaying the sauciness of this dish as well as showcasing our awesome tortilla rolling abilities. It was messy but it was a lot of fun. Also, it really helped having two people in the kitchen for this particular recipe. For instance, Vegyogini would heat up the tortillas in a frying pan and then I would get them covered with sauce and put filling (sweet potatoes, black beans, diced tomatoes, garlic, pepper) in them. We were rockin' a mini assembly line and I can't really imagine it any other way.
So, after that first photo was taken, we basically used the leftover filling to cover the enchiladas, we piled on more enchiladas sauce and then we put Tofutti mozzarella cheese slices all over the top. The recipe didn't call for vegan cheese so I guess you can say we modified the recipe one more time. :) I personally can't imagine enchiladas without some amount of cheese action. I also think you can kick these enchiladas up a notch with some freshly made guacamole and vegan sour cream. Even with all the modifications, these enchiladas are so healthy and fresh tasting. This recipe was enough to make 12 enchiladas, the perfect amount for 3 people (me, Vegyogini and my husband) with a decent amount of leftovers. Yay for leftovers!!!

Key Lime "Cheesecake"
I love this recipe because it doesn't call for too many ingredients. It's basically tofu, vegan cream cheese and lime juice. We had to modify this recipe as well because I mistakingly bought the wrong style of tofu. Instead of using firm Silken tofu (as the recipe called for), we used soft Silken tofu, which not only turned out to be amazing (with a little bit of starch) but I've decided I will always use soft tofu when making this in the future because it was so smooth and creamy. It was the perfect consistency in my opinion. This recipe called for ginger snap crumbs for the crust which I thought was pure genius. I know they are out there but I have yet to find vegan graham crackers, so using ginger snaps made a lot of sense to me.
Cheesecake takes a bit of time to cook and set but boy is it worth the wait! The three of us ate all but one slice (there was a total of 8 slices). Next time I make this cheesecake I'd like to add a fruit topping or glaze or maybe some ginger snap crumbs on top... not because it needs it - just for decoration.

After this cooking session, I realized that I had a lot of fun in the kitchen and I can't wait to try out new recipes.