The Cookbook Project

I'm not cool enough to have an offer from a publisher to adapt my own cookbook, but it doesn't mean I can't make one!  I saw a Pinterest post, of course, a while back about a woman who made a family cookbook and I instantly loved it!  (And here's the link if your interested too.)  Food has always been a passion of mine and though for a long time that was a bad thing in my life, I still love it, but this time in a different way.  A healthy way.  I just love what food does.  And mostly that's bring people together.  Nothing satisfies my soul more than to cook something for someone and see how much they enjoy it.  Sounds a little creepy, but I mean it in the best way possible.  haha

Pinterest has been both a good thing and a bad thing for me.  It's helped me to organize all of the recipes I had bookmarked or saved somewhere randomly on my browser, but it has also opened up a whole new world of finding recipes.  I love trying new things.  Sometimes they turn out ok, and some times they are out of this world crazy good.  Unfortunately I never remember them down the road.  And thus it comes time to plan out our weekly menu and I find myself at a loss of what to cook.  I hit Pinterest.  Browse for an hour.  Feel overwhelmed.  Whine to my husband.  And then I give up.  We regroup and I finally write down a few things and then we head to the store.  During the week I later find that I have written down too many complicated, time consuming recipes and I don't know which to cook!  It's no fun.  For anyone.  And we're all left frustrated and hungry.

So it's time to make some changes.  And there have been a few things I have done in the past month to make things better.  I'll talk about them more in depth in some following posts, but for now let's just get to a recipe.  We'll start simple.  My favorite cheezy topping.

Vegan Parmesan

Ingredients:
3/4 cup almonds
1/4 cup macadamia nuts
1/4 nutritional yeast
scant 1/2 tsp. salt

Directions:
Throw all of the ingredients in your food processor and blend just enough to resemble a fine parmesan cheese.  Don't want things to go too far or you may have a cheesy nut butter...though that may not be an idea.  Just let it go for a bit and then pulse it a few times to get the right consistency.  It won't take long.

Use in place of parmesan cheese.  That means as a topping, in recipes, etc...it's a versatile staple in our house.

I looked at a lot of recipes, but I really like the combination of this one.  The macadamia nuts add a little somethin' somethin' to it that I'm quite fond of.

Yummy cheezy goodness!