Vive le Vegan with Some Twists

I love Dreena Burton’s recipes and all three of her cookbooks. I love them because they are healthy, low fat, low sugar, and many are gluten free – just my style when it comes to good food. Main dish recipes use ingredients I always have on hand and they are written flawlessly. Her treats are small in quantity and never sickeningly sweet or full of margarine. And her recipes ALWAYS turn out perfectly. I revisited Vive le Vegan! on Sunday to make some of my favorite recipes for dinner.

Let me preface by saying that I was hoping Chase would come over for dinner, but I ended up taking dinner to him, so the pictures are rather boring.

Dreena’s recipes are also easily adapted. Sunflower Lentil Pie is one of my favorites. Say you get distracted and burn your pot of the last of the lentils in your pantry (oops!). Luckily I had a fresh pot of homemade pinto beans, so I decided to make the pie with pintos instead of lentils. I gave it a Mexican twist by seasoning it with cumin, red pepper flakes, and cilantro. The Mexican twist was easily inspired by wanting the cool Avocado Sauce from Vive to accompany the pie, and just plain loving all foods Mexican.

Here’s my Mexican Sunflower Pinto Pie.




And here’s the Avocado Sauce. I added cilantro to it.

Please imagine a perfect slice of spicy pie drizzled with the creamy dreamy Avocado Sauce. Doesn’t that look good?!!!! Even though I didn’t cut the pie and have a piece when it was done, I can tell you that the “batter” was fabulous. And of course Chase will tell you he ate nearly half of it for dinner.

I also made some colorful veggies – sauteed purple cabbage, with many onions and colored peppers from the farm box. I kept seasoning it and trying to spice it just how I wanted but couldn’t get it quite to my liking. I finally decided to stir in some bottled Italian Dressing and then I was happy.

Chase was very impressed with his veggies and loved them just as much as the pie. So again, imagine a pretty purple mound of cabbage next to that slice of pie on a plate.

For treats I made my all time favorite easy Vive recipe that always hits the spot, and is not too sweet yet full of flavor – Banana Oat Bundles. My usual twist to this recipe is to add chocolate chips. This time I added chocolate chips AND cacao nibs and they were heavenly.

So ends my ode to Dreena. I know there are many fabulous new vegan cookbooks out now, which I look forward to purchasing and cooking from soon, but it’s nice to have the good ol’ standbys to fall back on anytime. Thank you, Dreena, for providing me with so many “go to” recipes!