Low Fat Alfredo Sauce Recipe (With Video)

This transcription will have some mistakes because it is partially automated.

Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re gonna take a little bit different of a look at beans. And what I’m gonna do is rather than make a dish with beans, I’m going to make a vegetable dish and put a bean sauce on it.

So I’ve chosen some vegetables that are non starchy vegetables so that the bean sauce can be digested really nicely so I’ve chosen eggplant, zucchini. I like to put these together because they’re both vine plants.

And then I always like to get some greens in whenever I can so I got some kale and an onion. So I’m gonna start by chopping the onion and the eggplant. I’m gonna get the onion cooking and then the eggplant first because it takes the longest.

It’s about hot now so I’m going to add just a touch of olive oil to stir fry – not stir fry, sauté the onions and I use a large sweet onion which is more than I need for the vegetable dish but I’m gonna save some for the bean sauce and I’ll save about a quarter of the onion.

Ok, the onions are just starting to soften and because this is gonna stay on the heat for quite awhile I can add my eggplant right away. Now eggplant is also called aubergine which is the French name for eggplant so if you see that in a recipe, there you go!

Eggplants in Chinese medicine are looked at as a stimulator for blood circulation and they help to stimulate the liver which is the purifier of the blood so if there are any blood conditions, eggplant is a good thing to eat.

It is (excuse me) it is a cooling food so this is why we cook it for so long. It also makes the texture a lot nicer but if we cook this slowly for a long time so I have this on just medium heat rather than a high heat. It will bring some of the heat into the eggplant and make it not quite so cooling.

So I’ve got the eggplants just coated in the oil and mix in with the onions. What I’m gonna do at this point is put the lid on. Actually No, I’m gonna get the zucchini in first.

Ok, so eggplants had a few minutes on its own, next I’m going to add the zucchini right in here. I’ve got it diced as well somewhat the same size as the eggplant. I’ll give that a stir and then I’m gonna let it sit for a couple of minutes and once it had a couple of minutes to just cook in the oil a little bit with the other vegetables I’m gonna add a touch of salt and then cover it up so that it can cook with its own juices.

Alright! Zucchini has been in for a couple of minutes, as soon as you see it starts to look just a little bit soft like it’s starting to sweat a little bit that’s when the time you add the salt and cover it up.

And you’re adding enough salt for all of these vegetables so I’m doing probably about two teaspoons and then just stir it all together, just quickly and then cover it up.

And make sure that’s on medium medium low and we’ll give that probably about 15 minutes to cook and while I’m letting that cook I’m going to get going on the beans which I have here in the sink.

So if you’re cooking your beans I’ve posted directions on the recipe. If you’re using canned beans just rinse and drain them. I’m actually using canned beans today although I should have cooked them.

They’re much better if you use your own cooked beans for the sauce because they’re gonna be a lot creamier whereas if you’re using canned beans I’m using, the company that I use is really great they cooked their beans with no salt and they use combo in the cooking water so really great for a canned bean but it’s not quite as soft as it would be if I cooked them myself.

So get the beans into the blender and then add some water and you want the water because if you’re making a sauce here we want it to be creamy but we don’t want it to be too thin so I’m just gonna add enough water to come right up to the level of the beans.

And this will make it easy to blend and it will be fairly thick but I can always add more water later so better to be too thick at this point than too thin. So I’m gonna put this on the blender and just get it to a smooth texture.

So you can see that it is probably as thin as I ever wanted anyway and that’s just with the amount of water that I put in there to start. Next thing I’m gonna do is add the onions and I didn’t add them before because otherwise you need more liquid to get things going so when you’re using your blender it’s a good idea to do – to do things slowly and make sure you have enough liquid to do it.

But because we want this to be a nice creamy sauce, you don’t have to add too much. And if you get those onions right down into the liquid they will blend up much easier.

Ok, great texture, great smell. I put quite a bit onion in there so mine is gonna be pretty oniony. I like that but you may not so use as much as you wish and then I’m gonna add some salt and for this amount of sauce the beans were not cooked with salt right?

So you need to add enough to bring the flavor into them and what we’re bringing in is the onion flavour. It’s probably about two and a half to three teaspoons of salt there and then some nutritional yeast.

And I’m gonna put about a tablespoon of nutritional yeast in there and that is for a creamy flavor. If you don’t have nutritional yeast, it won’t taste quite the same, texture will be fine but I would try some other flavorings to add in there.

And the last thing I’m gonna add is some nutmeg. Find it, there it is! Alright! So these vegetables have softened right up. You can see that there. It also release a lot of olive juice because of the salt that put in there.

And so the next thing I’m gonna do is add my beautiful kale. I’ve got a whole lot of it because Phil and I love greens. Greens are one of the healthiest things you can eat so they help the digestion of all other foods especially proteins so because we’re having a bean sauce, that’s beautiful and creamy on itself. I’m putting lots of kale in here to help digest them.

Ok, so once you get that stirred around and just moisten, it won’t take long to shrink down and what I’m gonna do is just put the lid on for another couple of minutes and let it shrink down.

And I’m using castine which is very hot on the handles so use a towel to hold those. Ok, a couple of minutes and we’re ready to serve it.

Beautiful! See how much that kale has shrunk down and I put a lot in here, you don’t have to put that much if you don’t want to but like I said I love kale so that is ready to go. I’m going to turn the heat off because my castine pan keeps the heat for quite awhile.

So I’m gonna pour this right over the dish and get it mix right around in with the vegetables and because my pot is still hot, it’s gonna get heated or if you have a really shallow stainless steel pot you could what am I saying here, you can leave it like on minimum to see that the sauce is heated a little bit.

So beautiful creamy sauce here, I’ve done very little flavoring to it because I just want to exenterate the flavor of the beans and combine that with the lovely flavors of the vegetables.

Alright! There you go, a beautiful fat free creamy sauce courtesy of our beautiful white beans and some delicious vegetables in there. Lots of kale, very healthy for your dinner tonight.