I love the simplicity of this pasta. It feels like a traditional Italian dish, where meat is browned, and the fond in the pan is used to season the cream sauce. There is a simplicity to this dish, and a quickness with which it comes together that just makes you feel like you’re instinctively composing in the moment; like you’re a Nona at home in her Tuscan kitchen.
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I wanted to find a unique way to dress up “The Cream Sauce” so that y’all could see how truly versatile this sauce is. This “Creamy Vegan ‘Elote’ Pasta with Fuego Dust” is just the dish. Perfectly cooked fettuccine is tossed with a spicy red pepper cream sauce and sweet corn, and then topped with a generous sprinkling of ground Fuego Takis.
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A few (like 10) years ago, my friend Tony and I “summered” in Chicago. We spent the month of July in a sublet that had a box fan (that we purchased) and no air conditioning. Coming from Vegas, we had no idea that such places even existed. The thought of cooking or even eating hot food seemed too much to deal with, so we devised a meal planning strategy. Our idea, you see, was to make cold salads (pasta, macaroni, green… but mostly pasta), and serve those as our side dishes along with a main dish which we cooked in a Crock Pot. I wasn’t vegan at the time, and I did consume more mayonnaise that summer than anyone has the right to, but the point is that we survived a hot summer strategically planning our meals around cold salads.
So, as I was planning this week’s recipe video, I thought about that summer in Chicago. And I thought about how great it was to just have cold dishes in the fridge that could be made in advance, and eaten at any time, without having to heat up the house. I also thought about how much I missed green bean casserole… Inspired by that summer, and my favorite comfort food hot dishes, I came up this recipe.
I like the idea of a vegetable noodle, but often times the reality doesn’t match the expectation. Sweet potato noodles are too stiff when raw, and when overcooked, they break apart, and pretty much just turn into hash browns. Zucchini has a similar condition when raw, but the moment you put a hot sauce on them they spit out a bunch of water, and turn your pasta into noodle soup. So, what’s a guy to do when he wants vegetable noodles, but he wants them to be a little bit more convincing and easy to work with? He throws them in the air-fryer, that’s what.
Necessity is often the mother of invention. Sometimes it’s leftovers. Sometimes it’s having a block of silken tofu, or a bag of frozen cauliflower, instead of a cup of cashews. This recipe came about as a creative use of leftover “chipotle hollandaise” from my Vegan Chicken and Cornbread Waffle Benedict recipe. I just tossed some brown rice pasta with the sauce and topped it with some leftover canned fried onions, and the rest is history. But then I wanted to make it again, but I didn’t have cashews, so I used a block of silken tofu. And the rest of that was history. Then I tried it again one day, using a cauliflower cream sauce recipe, and history was made again.
Dan Dan Noodles are a pungent, spicy and complex Sichuan dish. I had them for the first time a few years ago, and ever since that first taste, I knew I had to find a recipe. However, many of the recipes out there call for a number of hard-to-find ingredients that I have never really wanted to track down. I stumbled upon a recipe at The Woks of Life a few months ago, and it seemed easy enough to make, and easy enough to veganize. So, here it is. This recipe comes together pretty quick, and it’s definitely greater than the sum of its parts. The “meat” part of this recipe can take many forms. I’ve used seitan in this recipe, but you could swap in hydrated TVP, mushrooms, or even tofu.
