Vegan Enchilada Sauce

Vegan Enchilada Sauce PinThis Vegan Enchilada Sauce recipe is mildly spicy with delicious depth of flavor. It’s designed to go with our Sweet Potato Black Bean Enchiladas, but it tastes great on lots of things!

Amelia makes us a large batch and we keep it in the fridge for up to a week. I like to heat up some leftover sweet potatoes and pour this sauce over them. You could also use this enchilada sauce on Vegan Nachos or as a dip for corn chips.

As with almost everything we make these days, this recipe is oil-free. There’s just no need for oil in most recipes except some desserts.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Vegan Baked Beans

Vegan Baked Beans PinThis Vegan Baked Beans recipe (or BBQ Baked Beans) is absolutely delicious! It’s sweet, savory and spicy, but it also has a LOT of sugar, so do your best not to eat all of it in one sitting!

For a 1/2 cup serving, there are 207 calories with 92 coming from sugar. It has 23 grams of sugar (still far less than a can of soda), which is more than half of the recommended daily value. That means this is NOT a health food recipe. It’s meant to be a treat on a special occasion (like Labor Day) or a family event when you want to show people how good vegan food can taste. If you’re currently a diabetic, you should definitely not eat these beans!

While this recipe does have a lot of sugar, it also has some healthy ingredients. The beans are loaded with protein and fiber, as well as calcium and iron. They’re also really low fat, with less than half a gram per serving. Our bodies are very efficient at burning carbs (including sugar) for energy, and they’re very efficient at storing fat for future use during times of famine (that most of us never have to experience). So if you’re in good shape, at your ideal body weight, and without diabetes, you can enjoy these Vegan Baked Beans knowing your body will know how to handle the carbs (it’ll probably make you feel like going for a long walk after dinner).

Most BBQ Baked Beans are made with lard and/or bacon, which obviously isn’t vegan or healthy (unless you live in upside-down world). However, you can achieve a similar taste by using liquid smoke. After all, that’s what gives bacon it’s flavor. Without liquid smoke and sometimes maple syrup or molasses, bacon would taste like bland, fatty meat…pretty much how all meat tastes without plants added for seasoning. But if the liquid smoke is too reminiscent of bacon for you, just skip it.

If you’re in the US, most liquid smoke and molasses aren’t vegan. That’s because they contain non-organic sugar, which is processed using the ground up bones of dead animals to give it a pretty white color. Sugar in most parts of the world has a tan hue, which tastes the same, it’s just not as superficially pretty. Look for “pure liquid smoke” without molasses. And look for vegan or organic molasses, or molasses made with organic sugar.

These Vegan Baked Beans pair well with any vegan burger, potato salad, corn-on-the-cob, green beans, or any of your favorite vegan recipes.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Vegan Tortilla Soup

Vegan Tortilla Soup PinEven though I just finished eating lunch, my mouth is watering just thinking about this Vegan Tortilla Soup recipe! It’s that good!

While conventional tortilla soup typically uses chicken as the protein, we used white beans instead. Beans are loaded with protein and fiber, but contain no cholesterol nor measurable saturated fat. They’re also a good source of iron, magnesium and potassium.

There are several different types of white beans: navy beans, great northern beans, cannellini beans and butterbeans. We like navy beans in our soups because the starch gets released during cooking, making the soup creamier. However, you can use whichever beans you prefer or have on-hand for this recipe.

For the tortilla strips, we used two small corn tortillas made with only two ingredients: whole corn and water. Whole Foods carries organic corn tortillas that are made with corn, water and a hint of lime. When eating a whole-food plant-based (WFPB) no-oil diet, it’s important to look for minimally processed foods without added oils and sugars (or other mystery ingredients).

We cubed some avocado as a topping for our vegan tortilla soup, but if you’re trying to lose weight or lower your cholesterol, you may want to skip the avocado until you’ve reached your goal. Saturated fat, regardless of whether it comes from a plant or animal, will raise your cholesterol and can contribute to heart disease and weight gain.

This recipe pairs well with a nice Side Salad or some Corn Tortilla Corn Chips and Salsa.

Vegan Tortilla Soup Cooking Video

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Easy Black Eyed Peas

Vegan Black Eyed Peas PinThis Easy Black Eyed Peas recipe is one of my favorite dishes! Even though I didn’t like black eyed peas before switching to a plant based diet, along with cucumbers, beets and onions, they’ve joined the growing list of foods that I didn’t like before, but love now.

This recipe loaded with protein, fiber and iron. One serving (about 1 cup) has 18 grams of protein, 10 grams of fiber and 42% RDV of Iron with only 263 calories. That means this recipe is not only nutrient dense and filling, but it’s also relatively low calorie. That makes it a great weight loss recipe, too!

My mom’s side of the family comes from a small town in Missouri (pronounced Missour-a in my family) so we know southern cookin’ and black eyed peas are a staple in the south.

When I was a kid, mom always made them on New Year’s day. It’s an old southern tradition that’s said to bring good luck throughout the year. Even though I hated black eyed peas back then, mom still made me eat a spoonful…just to be safe.

Well, now I love them and Amelia is kind enough to make them for me on the regular. We normally eat them with a salad, but they would also pair well with another southern favorite, our Vegan Cornbread.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Vegan Sweet Potato Fries

Vegan Sweet Potato Fries PinThese Vegan Sweet Potato Fries are sweet, savory, spicy and delicious! Dip them in our Vegan BBQ Sauce for even more flavor and spice!

We rarely use oil when cooking anymore, but we used 1/2 tsp oil for two sweet potatoes in this recipe. We’ve tried several recipes that don’t use any oil for potato fries, but the fries come out mushy and stick to the pan, and the seasonings don’t stick to the fries.

All it takes is a tiny amount of oil to make them come out crisp and delicious. The trick is to stir the oil into the uncooked sweet potatoes fries first in a large metal or non-sticky bowl to get an even coating before stirring in the seasonings.

I prefer my sweet potato fries a little soft. Cook them a little longer if you want them crispier.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.

Sweet Potato Black Bean Enchiladas

These Vegan Sweet Potato Black Bean Enchiladas are so deliciously amazing we can’t get enough of them! They’re sweet, spicy, savory and oh so flavorful!

If you’ve ever cooked your own enchiladas, especially without deep frying the tortillas in oil, you’ll be able to sympathize with us on how challenging it is to get them to look pretty. We had to cook this recipe 3 times to not only perfect the ingredients, but to get the pictures to come out well enough to post on our website.

But it was SOOOO worth it!

The trick was to steam the tortillas in a steamer pot for about 1o to 15 seconds before assembling them. Kind of like how they do it at Chipotle. That made the tortillas very soft and pliable. We also used Mi Rancho Organic Corn Tortillas with Guar Gum, which also helped hold them together through the steaming and assembly process.

We actually took these photos before we baked them, though. So yours might not look the same when they come out of the oven. You can see in the prep photo below what they look like in the casserole dish fresh from the oven.

These Sweet Potato Black Bean Enchiladas pair well with a little shredded lettuce salad on the side, along with some Corn Tortilla Corn Chips  and some of my Grandpa’s Dipping Hot Sauce. We used grandpa’s hot sauce in our enchiladas, too. If you plan to do the same, be sure to make it ahead of time.

If you make this recipe, please let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And please share with your friends to help spread the word about healthy plant based eating.