Vegetarian Tempeh Recipe

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we’re going to make a dish with tempeh and broccoli.

And we’re going to make a creamy vegetable sauce to go on top which is one of my favourite things to do because it ups the serving of your vegetables in your dinner while making things delicious and it’s a low fat way to have a creamy sauce.

So what I’m going to start with is I’m going to steam some broccoli that I have cut up into sections. You could eat it raw or steamed. I’m a little bit cold today so I decided to - to slightly steam it.

And tip when you’re cutting up broccoli, the stem is also a great thing to eat. It’s used to be my favourite part of the broccoli when I was little because it has a much milder flavour than the actual head of the broccoli so if you got some picky kids who don’t want to eat their broccoli, try giving them the stems and see how it goes.

Key to steaming is to get a little bit of salt on your vegetables to draw the moisture out and allow them to cook otherwise they’re just going to take a long time and they’re not gonna cook quite as well.

So, I’ve just rubbed a little bit of salt onto my broccoli and I’ve got it lay out in my bamboo steamer which I will put the lid on top of and put it onto this pot of water on the back here that is almost come to a boil.

So that I can just leave and then I’m going to start on sauce. I’m going to heat up a pan here and I’m going to dice an onion. Onions are key when you’re making a vegetable sauce because otherwise it’s just gonna taste like pureed vegetables which is somewhat reminiscent of baby food.

So, slice up your onion, I’m gonna diced it but we are putting it in a blender afterwards so it doesn’t really matter how you cut it up. So cut up your onion, once this pan is hot throw it in there.

Once this pot heats up, you can pour a little bit of oil in here, I’m using olive and the nice thing about heating up the pan beforehand is you’d probably are gonna use less oil. I realized recently that in my recipes I have been running a tablespoon of oil when actually I probably use more like a teaspoon.

So, we have to go back and change all that, the only thing you wanna do is get the vegetables into the pot as soon as you throw your oil in there because the oil doesn’t really needs to heat up, it’s the vegetables that need to heat up.

So get those stirred around. The purpose of the oil is to coat the vegetables and protect them, not to get hot. So that’s how you’re gonna do and then you want these onions to soften up a little bit and then you can throw in your garlic. So at this point you can just start chopping away your garlic.

Alright! Onions and garlic softening up nicely, so the next thing I’m going to throw in here is my zucchini and I’m using this beautiful, yellow, sunburst or pippin zucchini.

So when you are cooking a vegetable like this you just it in a pan, stir it around so it gets coated in the oil and then just let it sits on the heat so that it actually cook. When you stir it, it’s not gonna really cook because you’re taking it off the heat all the time.

So, all I’m looking for is the zucchini to soften just slightly and this is just to seal in the flavour of the zucchini, you can easily do this raw, you just wanna be more careful with the onion and maybe do a little more zucchini instead.

So this is looking done, I’m gonna turn this off. I’m not actually gonna cook the peppers at all, I’ll keep them raw. The only reason that I am cooking these at all really is because I said I’m kinda cold today so want to have something a little bit warming.

Alright! We’re ready for the blender. Now I use a blender like this. This is the easiest one to use and it will also make your sauce the smoothest but if you have a hand blender that would work as well.

You don’t have a blender you kinda out of luck but you can just do the same dish just with vegetables and not make it into a sauce maybe.

Alright! So, what I’m gonna do is put all these onions and zucchini in the blender. Alright! So I’ve got the zucchini, onion and garlic in the blender and now what I’m gonna do is add water.

And the amount of water that you’ll add is going to result to the consistency you have for your sauce so what I’d like to do usually is add just enough water that this blender is gonna to multi-blend things smoothly. If there’s not enough, it won’t really blend very well and you’ll see you will have trouble.

But if you add too much its gonna be watery so what I’m gonna do is add water to about halfway up the level of the vegetables. We’ll start from there.

So this consistency is looking pretty nice, I don’t wanna add any more water than that. What I’m gonna do next is throw in the yellow peppers and my spices.

So I’ve got some salt, some pepper, a little bit of nutmeg. I don’t know why but creamy sauces, nutmeg is like the secret ingredient that makes it taste really good. I’ve also got some nutritious yeast which is not necessarily if you can’t find it. It just adds a bit more creamy flavour.

Now the salt is to bring those flavours together so you need a fair bit of it but not so much that this sauce taste salty. So give that a whirl. Once the peppers have gotten smooth out in the sauce, give it a taste. Crucial to make sure you have the right amount of flavour in there before you served it up. I like it.

It’s really nice and fresh. But its soft, kinda creamy, the peppers give it a really good yellow colour and a little bit iridescence because of the, you know the skin, its a little bit iridescence.

Tempeh! I get it like this, just a block and I’m just gonna cube it up, put it in a bowl with my broccoli and pour this sauce on top. If you can’t find tempeh you can just use some beans. Using some canned beans would make this really nice and quick.

Alright! I got my nicely steamed broccoli going in a bowl with my tempeh and what I’m gonna do is just pour the sauce on here and mix it up and serve it.

This is a really easy dish to take with you for a picnic, for pot luck. If you’re serving it at home you can just put some vegetables and the tempeh on a plate and pour some sauce over it but I’m just gonna mix it right up.

And there you go a delicious healthy vegan tempeh and broccoli dish with the vegetable creamy sauce.

If you enjoyed it, you can find the recipe at HealthyVeganRecipe.net. I’m Heather and this is Freshly Served.