Fall Vegetable Casserole

Normally, M is the master of the kitchen. However, he is currently busy mastering the web at work, so I am stepping up. Since we are going out of town this weekend to the Gathering, I needed to come up with a recipe that would use up a few ingredients around the house, such as stale bread, crookneck squash, and a half of a container of silken tofu. I was inspired by a recipe that Kate found a few weeks ago, but the preparation was complicated slightly by the fact that I couldn't find the recipe and had to convert it to vegan. But it turned out so delicious, that I had to share it.

First make some stuffing. I did this by sauteing celery and onion in about a tablespoon of oil, the adding some dried thyme and sage, and salt and pepper to taste. I mixed this together with the stale bread (which I had ground into bread crumbs in the food processor) and set it aside. Ideally, I would have also added some broth to make it moist, but having none, I just used water, and it turned out ok.

Next I cut up some carrots and a crookneck squash, but any kind of firm squash or root vegetable would probably be good, except maybe beets. To facilitate the cooking time (as I had come up with this idea about 30 minutes before the workers were set to return home), I steamed the vegies for a couple of minutes until they were slightly softened.

To make the vegan bechemel sauce, I ground up some pine nuts (it called for cashews, but we didn't have any) into a fine powder, then blended it with the silken tofu, and added some water to thin it out. I sauted the other half of the onion, and once it was soft, I blended the tofu mixture in with it, added salt and pepper, cooked it for a couple of minutes, then poured it over the steamed vegies in a casserole dish. I topped it with the bread crumb stuffing mixture and stuck it in the oven for about 30 minutes. A hit with vegans and non-vegans alike.

I'm making a larger point by sharing this recipe. Yes, you can open a can of cream of chicken soup and pour it over some vegetables, then layer stove-top stuffing and bake. But that has a lot of fat and sodium. My version is cholesterol free, low in fat, and even has some protein (from the tofu and nuts).