Pasta with Tempeh and Roasted Garlic Sauce

It's a warm day today -- and it has my apartment humid and kind of unpleasant. It probably doesn't help that I just deep cleaned the bathroom, which leaves me wanting to just lay around and be like "See, I did work, I can play Sims the rest of the afternoon right?"

The answer is no.

Pasta with Tempeh and Roasted Garlic Sauce

So this is a bit awkward. I've been meaning to put this recipe up for ages, and now that I'm finally getting to it... the blog is gone :(. So you all can have SOMETHING to check out, I quickly found this recipe which looks very similar... Once I got to the recipe. However, the original recipe was based mostly on just tempeh, tomatoes, and roasted garlic, without the extra veggies.



It also looks pretty unflattering when paired with green pasta.

It's been a while since I made this recipe, but I still recall that I found it kind of meh, at most. It was a bit watery, hence why it doesn't seem to be covering the pasta very well at all, but I've found that true of many homemade sauces. I actually cut back on the amount of tomato used, so perhaps it was partially my fault; the tomatoes I had were huge and I didn't think I needed both of them.

The tempeh itself still retains a lot of the original flavouring that I think is from preservatives or SOMETHING. Basically, it just didn't seem to cook all that well in the sauce. If I recall, the leftovers that I microwaved with some pasta fared a bit better than fresh, which really is just bizarre.

So overall, I think adding some tomato paste could help give the sauce some body, while perhaps cooking the tempeh then adding it to the sauce would help with the flavour. I'm noticing that the recipe I linked as a substitute has you BOIL the tempeh which strikes me as a bit "Huh?". I don't know how the texture of that would be.

Overall rating? 5/10. It wasn't that impressive but it wasn't awful either.

Bonus Rating! The spinach noodles you see up there are Garden Time Fancy Spinach Ribbons, which is really just a ridiculously pretentious name for cut wide spaghetti. They brag about their pasta on the bag, and it's expensive stuff.

It also doesn't taste any better than Target brand. Raw it has a odd texture but I can taste the spinach, but once cooked? Pretty bland flavouring. I'm pretty neutral on recommending it, really. I guess that's another 5/10? 6/10? Something around there.

Until next time...

Tschuess.

Tempeh Fakin' Bacon

It's been a while. Sorry for that; I've been busy. Since I'm now SO backed up, I'm going to try and write quite a few posts tonight, and just set them to be posted later.

Today's recipe is from a site I used to go to quite often, years ago, but since have left since I have found it to go downhill, and also it's not nearly as effective as it claims.

Tempeh Fakin' Bacon

This website is Care2, and the recipe has this lovely picture of tempeh/tofu (it looks like a weird mix of both), while the recipe itself is super easy. It's also basically taken from here (though they do credit it), so I'll just let both of them be around.

So. I cut the recipe in fourths or something but otherwise, same recipe.



On a scale from 1 to 10, guess how much I recommend it just based on this photo alone?

That's right, it's pretty bad.

So this does take that bacon. And I quickly realized why. It tastes like pure salt.

Soy sauce is choked full of salt, especially apparently if you buy a rum-sized bottle of it for only about $2. Simmering the tempeh in soy sauce then did very little to make it taste like soy and a lot more to make it taste like salt. I'm VERY sensitive to the taste of salt, so I actually ended up throwing this poor tempeh away, as I just couldn't handle it.

Luckily, this is a very easy fix; just use either much less soy sauce and substitute a different marinade (maybe a vegan/vegetarian BBQ sauce? Homemade BBQ sauce is very easy to make. Or something smokey?) or use reduced sodium soy sauce. This may help save the recipe.

However, I am perfectly content to let Morningstar Farms make me some veggie bacon, even if it has a list of ingredients big enough to build a house, and skip this recipe. If you're vegan or just against foods with a huge amount of ingredients, though, perhaps try the modifications and tell me how it goes!

On its own, without modifications, I give this a 2.5/10. It had to be thrown away and was a waste of a great food (tempeh), but there is room for modifications and thus hope.

Bonus Photo!



Plum and chocolate ice cream. If you're going to make plum ice cream, don't use that much extra sugar! Ripe plums have plenty of it :)

Until next time...

Tschuess.