Lazy Girl Easy Vegan Enchiladas

Easy Vegan Enchiladas PinThis Easy Vegan Enchiladas recipe is fast and easy to make. Why spend time trying to wrap and bake tricky enchiladas when you can do them open-faced?

I love our Sweet Potato Black Bean Enchiladas recipe, but we never have it because it’s such a pain to make. When we first made them for the website, it took us 3 tries to get them to come out good enough to be photographed. And we haven’t made them since!

So I asked Amelia if we could do them a different way that would be easier. After all, it’s the ingredients that taste good; not the shape. I suggested we sauté the filling in our cast iron skillet and then bake it covered in our Vegan Enchilada Sauce, but Amelia’s way was even easier. We served them open-faced on corn tortillas and poured the enchilada sauce over them. Then we topped them with some baked corn tortilla strips.

These “lazy girl” enchiladas, as Amelia calls them, are by far the easiest and fastest way to make delicious enchiladas.

Easy Vegan Enchiladas

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 Mexican Stir Fry

Vegan Mexican Stir Fry PinThis Vegan Mexican Stir Fry is a great weeknight meal since it’s quick to make and amazingly delicious. Since this recipe only has about 89 calories per serving, you really need to eat it with something else. You can prepare some brown rice and refried beans ahead of time and heat them up to save time.

It takes only a few minutes to chop up some peppers and onions, and since most of the flavor comes from the salsa, you can easily have this ready to eat in under 10 minutes.

We make ours with my Grandpa’s Vegan Dipping Hot Sauce and Amelia’s Vegan Refried Beans, but you can just as easily use store-bought refried beans and salsa. Just make sure they’re oil-free and lard-free. A lot of canned refried beans have lard. Yuck!

This is one of our go-to recipes. We eat this one almost every week, especially on nights when Amelia has her belly dancing class at The Tribal Fusion House here in Cuenca, Ecuador. If you’d like to see her belly dancing, here’s a video. She’s in front on the right.

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.

Tahini Stir Fry with Tofu

Tahini Stir Fry PinThis Tahini Stir Fry with Tofu recipe is one of our favorites stir fries. We used to eat this one almost every week because it’s fast, easy and flavorful. However, since I found out I still have high cholesterol, we’ve cut this one out for awhile.

We still eat stir fries similar to this one every week, but the tofu and tahini add 5 grams of saturated fat per serving, which is way more than I need to consume while trying to lower my cholesterol. It’s also not great for weight loss so if you’re trying to lose weight or lower your cholesterol, you’re better off eating our low-fat Easy Vegan Asian Stir Fry.

Greger might disagree with this advice, but I side with Esselstyn and Ornish on this one. They’re the experts in heart disease, which runs rampant in my family, along with cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity. With the deck stacked against me, Amelia and I have decided to err on the side of caution when it comes to foods high in saturated fat, like tahini.

With that said, the tofu in this recipe adds a nice meaty texture and contributes most of the 18 grams of protein. And it absorbs the flavors of the sauce and other ingredients so it’s very tasty. This recipe is also loaded with fiber, vitamin C, calcium and iron.

This is a nice one-pot meal (not counting the rice) so it’s also fast and easy to clean up.

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 Vegan Asian Stir Fry [Oil-Free]

Easy Vegan Asian Stir Fry PinThis Easy Vegan Asian Stir Fry that’s oil-free is one of our staple recipes. We eat this one usually once and sometimes twice per week. We typically serve it over healthy brown rice, but sometimes we eat it plain or over some boiled yellow potatoes.

We almost always have the main ingredients on-hand: broccoli, cauliflower, peppers, mushrooms, onions, red cabbage and garlic. But feel free to use whatever you have on-hand or need to use before it goes bad, like green peas, snap-peas, carrots, sprouts, spinach, etc. Be creative!

This recipe has lots of protein, fiber, iron and enough vitamin C for 3 days RDV. With the soy sauce and salt, it’s a little high in sodium, so feel free to skip the salt and/or use low sodium soy sauce.

Like most of our recipes nowadays, we don’t use any oil in this steam fry. Without the rice, this recipe only has 155 calories, but add 1 tbsp of olive oil and you nearly double that. There’s simply no need to add all those extra calories from a liquid that’s 100% processed refined fat. Besides, lots of evidence suggests oil is “The Vegan Killer.”

Instead, we sauté using our homemade Easy Vegetable Broth from Scraps. It doesn’t add many calories, but it does add a lot of delicious flavor.

Since this recipe is so low in calories, but high in nutrient density, it’s a great weight loss recipe. Skip the brown rice and eat it plain to reduce the calories even more.

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 Sloppy Joes

Vegan Sloppy Joes PinThese Vegan Sloppy Joes are loaded with 16g protein thanks to the lentils, and they taste just like the Sloppy Joes I had as a kid. To be honest, though, I didn’t like sloppy joes as a kid. But loved them as an adult.

You could make these with Beyond Meat Beefy Crumbles. That would be delicious, but we prefer to stick to whole-foods whenever possible and the lentils are perfect for this recipe.

We ate ours the old fashioned way: on a bun. But they would taste great over pasta, Spaghetti Squash and especially over some Boiled Potatoes.

As a side dish, some Vegan French Fries and Green Beans would be very tasty!

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 Stuffed Peppers

Vegan Stuffed Peppers PinThese Vegan Stuffed Peppers are amazing! Thanks to the lentils, the look, taste and texture are almost identical to traditional stuffed peppers made with ground beef. I bet you can fool people if you don’t tell them it’s vegan.

Stuffed peppers are loved around the world with slight variations in the recipes. If you come from an area that uses cheese, you can melt some Daiya on top of the peppers or sprinkle with some Nutritional Yeast.

You can also make these with Beefy Crumbles from Beyond Meat instead of using lentils. However, Daiya and Beyond Meat are both processed foods so they’re not as healthy as the whole plant alternatives.

This recipe calls for Grandpa’s Vegan Dipping Hot Sauce and Vegan Cashew Cream so you’ll either need to make these ahead of time or substitute them with a prepackaged alternative.

You can make a meal out of these, but they also pair well with Healthy Butternut Squash, a Side Salad, a slice of Whole Grain Bread, Steamed Broccoli or your other favorite side dishes.

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 Fajitas (Oil-Free)

Vegan Fajitas PinThese Vegan Fajitas with roasted portobello mushrooms and sautéed onions and peppers is absolutely delicious, and very nutritious!

Three corn tortillas topped with all the fixin’s has 450 calories, 11 grams of fiber and 17 grams of protein. Add to that: 70% RDA of Vitamin A, 315% Vitamin C, 76% Calcium and 24% Iron. And this doesn’t include the optional avocado, brown rice or refried beans!

Looking at these stats for one vegan dish, it’s hard to understand how the protein and calcium deficiency myths gained traction and continue to be two of the most common questions vegans get asked.

We used corn tortillas in our recipe because they’re made with only corn and water. They contain no refined flour or oil. Most flour tortillas we’ve found here in Ecuador have either oil or lard, and we haven’t found any whole wheat tortillas, so we opted for the healthier non-GMO corn tortillas. If you can find oil and lard free whole wheat flour tortillas, feel free to use those instead of corn.

Vegan Fajitas

We like using my Grandpa’s Vegan Dipping Hot Sauce on our vegan fajitas, but you can use your favorite salsa. Just be sure to get a salsa without oil or a lot of added sugar, as most store-bought brands contain one or both.

The avocado, brown rice and Refried Beans are optional since this is already a filling and high calorie meal without them. However, they make great companions for these Vegan Fajitas! These are also fantastic topped with a little Vegan Cashew Sour Cream!

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.

Healthy Red Beans and Rice

Healthy Red Beans and Rice PinThis Healthy Red Beans and Rice recipe is full of color, flavor and texture. With only 209 calories per serving, it packs 12 grams of fiber, 9 grams of protein, 89% RDV of Vitamin A, 174% Vitamin C and 25% Iron. This traditional Creole dish is a nutrition powerhouse!

Amelia’s mom gave us this recipe that she found in the American Diabetes Associations’ Diabetes & Heart Healthy Cookbook. I think it’s interesting that the original recipe calls for sautéing the veggies in olive oil when several studies suggest that added fat such as olive oil is a leading cause of Type II diabetes. Needless-to-say, we replaced the oil with vegetable broth as we generally do to remove the added fat.

This is a nice one-pot recipe that makes a great stand-alone dish, but it also pairs well with a healthy Side Salad or a slice of multigrain bread for dipping.

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.

Grandpa’s Vegan Dipping Hot Sauce

Vegan Dipping Hot Sauce PinI was raised on Grandpa’s Vegan Dipping Hot Sauce recipe and loved it! Although he didn’t call it vegan, it didn’t contain any animal products…only delicious veggies straight from his garden.

Yes, this is my Grandpa Gene’s amazing jarred hot sauce recipe, modified to make it a more manageable batch size. He made this hot sauce using 5 quarts of homegrown tomatoes. That’s 160 ounces of tomatoes!

He loved giving them out to friends and family, and we loved eating them! This recipe only makes about 40 ounces and I’ve reduced everything to about 1/4 of the original except the salt and sugar, which I reduced to 1/8 of the original.

Original Vegan Dipping Hot Sauce RecipeHere’s his original recipe card in case you’re uber ambitious and want to make the full batch (click to enlarge). The original recipe calls for a lot of salt and sugar but I cut it in half and it still tastes great. Maybe that’s because our tastebuds have changed and are more sensitive since going vegan.

While most hot sauce recipes are meant to be consumed in small amounts, dripped on your food to add some spice, this recipe is different. You can still use it as a condiment, but it’s superb as a dipping hot sauce. It’s spicy, but not so much that you can eat it with your favorite corn chips. You can also make it spicier or more mild by varying the quantity of jalapeño peppers.

We prefer to make our own Corn Tortilla Corn Chips using organic, oil-free corn tortillas. This Vegan Dipping Hot Sauce also tastes great on Boiled Potatoes, Vegan Baked Potatoes, Tofu Scramble, Vegan Huevos Rancheros, or any other dish that could use a little extra flavor.

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.