Creamy avocado pasta sauce.

I love being a vegan!  I love it so much because there is one important aspect of veganism that is particularly appealing to me: you have to be willing to try things out of the ordinary.  As some doors close, other, more wonderful doors, open.

One such closed door was Alfredo sauce.  I was never the hugest fan of Alfredo to start with, but sometimes at restaurants I would find myself with few other appealing options, so I would indulge. When I was in university I used to eat a lot of Alfredo with pasta, so I think I was burnt out on it.  And its artery-clogging-ness.

So yesterday when I was searching for Angela Liddon's blog to grab her Weekend Glow Kale Salad recipe that I was making with dinner last night, in the Google search bar, I noticed that Angela had posted this recipe for 15 Minute Creamy Avocado Pasta.  I had a half of an avocado left over from making the Kale Salad, so I thought I would go for it.  I'm going to do the Grouse Grind later today, so I thought it would be a great idea to have some whole wheat pasta for lunch.

As always, I altered the recipe somewhat.  Here's what I used:

• 2 tbsp minced garlic from container, plus 1 tbsp of the oil the garlic was in
• 1.5 tbps lemon juice
• 1/2 avocado
• 6 pitted kalamata olives
• large pinch salt

I put the ingredients in my food processor and processed until fairly smooth.  I cooked the pasta in accordance with the directions on the package.  Once the pasta was cooked and strained, I just poured/scooped the sauce onto the pasta. It was delicious.  Absolutely fantastic.  I love garlic, olives and avocados.  The sauce is so creamy!  It is just so good! I really recommend trying this recipe, either with or without olives.  If I could do it again, I would perhaps not use any salt (the original recipe uses basil, but I used olives, so I think they added a lot of salt, making the salt in the recipe superfluous), and I might use this recipe to make two servings instead of the whole recipe to make only one serving of pasta.  Either way, it was absolutely one of the tastiest pasta sauces I've ever had, so I can foresee me experimenting a lot with this one!

Kale salad.

My lovely husband, Tim, bought me not one, but two, edible kale plants this week, and we went back to the gardening store and bought two more.  I decided that today I was going to make us one heck of a nice kale salad.  I decided to make the Weekend Glow Kale Salad recipe that Angela Liddon has on her blog Oh She Glows.

The salad comprised of:

• 7-8 kale leaves
• 1/2 sweet onion
• 8 heirloom tomatoes (small kind)
• 1/2 an avocado
• 1 red pepper
• 1/3 english cucumber
• 1/4 cup chopped walnuts
• 1 tbsp black sesames

Although this doesn't exactly match Angela's recipe, it's pretty close, so I'm totally giving her the credit she deserves, particularly because I also made the tahini-lemon dressing she provides the recipe for on her blog.  In the end the salad, accompanied by some sage roasted sweet potatoes and eggplant and broccoli rogan josh, came together to make one of the best dinners I've ever made at home!