GF Vegan Sunflower Pesto w/ Zesty Wilted Spinach!

Life on the home front continues as usual as another week comes to a close. I’ve started a new medicine and am hopeful that a) it works, and b) I don’t get the horrendous side effects I did from it’s “cousin” medicine. Ulcerative Colitis requires the medicine–mesalamine–for healing and maintenance.  There are many different brands of this medicine, from patented prescription drugs, to “expired-patent-now-generic-drugs,” which all are the same drug, just in different forms. Well, I recently switched brands, hoping that a new “form” of mesalamine will bring about healing from this flare.

Thank you Mrs. B!

ANYWAYS! I recently received a super thoughtful gift from one of my mom’s friends: The Moosewood Cookbook. This antique cookbook is from 1977 and was HANDWRITTEN by Mollie Katzen.

handwritten, beautifully decorated pages!

The thing about this cookbook that is so cool…besides its beauty…is that it is one of the first vegetarian cookbooks in the country! And they are recipes from the one of the 1st all-vegetarian restaurants in the country: TheMoosewood Restaurant in Ithica, New York. This restaurant was WAY ahead of its time…it was founded in 1973!  I’m so excited to start cooking my way through this cookbook!

Mollie Katzen drew gorgeous pictures throughout the book!

So for tonight’s dinner, it was a “raid-the-fridge-and-make-a-meal” kind of a night. I made vegan pesto and some wilted dijon spinach.

creamy GF vegan sunflower pesto!

The only tweak to the pesto was that I used SUNFLOWER SEEDS instead of pine nuts, because we didn’t have any!

I put into the food processor:

1 cup fresh basil

1/2 c toasted sunflower seeds

1 T EVOO

juice of 1/2 lemon

2 garlic cloves

sea salt

1 T water (more or less until you get desired consistency)

2 T pasta water right before tossing with pasta

The addition of the pasta water at the end really enhanced the consistency of the sauce.     It was more “slurpy” — for lack of a better word. It was really enjoyable. And as far as the sunflower seeds, you really couldn’t tell that it wasn’t made with pine nuts! They are much cheaper too!!

Along with the pesto, I made wilted dijon spinach.

I sauteed:

1 small onion: diced

2 garlic cloves, minced

6 or 7 button mushrooms, sliced

grape tomatoes, halved

3 big handfuls of baby spinach

I sauteed those in 1 tsp EVOO with salt and pepper. Part way through the cooking process, I added 2-3 T white wine and let that evaporate. Finally, when the GF pasta was ready to be drained, I added the spinach to the sautee. In order to create steam to wilt the spinach, I added to the pan 1 T dijon mustard dissolved in a large splash of water. I then covered the pot with a lid to trap the steam and wilt the spinach.

Zesty GF Vegan Dijon Spinach!

This was so so yummy. The tang from the mustard was superb, and not at all over powering.  My parents didn’t even know that there was mustard in it! They just knew they loved the flavor!

This meal is proof that you really can eat amazingly flavorful food without a lot of added fat and calories. This meal in total only had a little over 1 T oil, and it was a party in your mouth! We were all commenting that there was no oil resedue or grease left on our plates (that were clean :) ). You can eat healthy and still have fantastic dishes too.

This meal, I used my food processor, which, as you may know, I'm obsessed with. I use it literally every day. Here's the CuisinArt I use: