This is a super quick pasta dish. It’s creamy and high in protein thanks to the added lentils and nutritional yeast. Perfect for a nutritious quick meal in minutes.
I put this dish together one day when I was in a rush and wanted to make something relatively healthy. I was really happy with the result and now often make it when short on time.
How to Make Creamy Pasta without Dairy
There are plenty of ways to achieve a creamy flavour for a dish without using dairy. One ingredient often used is nutritional yeast. If you like creamy flavours and want to reduce dairy or don’t eat dairy then you need silken tofu in your life.
This is a deactivated yeast that is a great source of vitamins and minerals. It’s also a great source of protein with a whopping 60% of its calories coming from protein.
You can simply sprinkle it on any dish and stir it in and the heat will make it melt and form a cheesy flavour and texture. It’s rarely available in supermarkets from my experience but all health food shops stock it, again from my experience, and you can also order nutritional yeast from Amazon.
To make this dish even more creamier we add some…..well……cream. Makes sense. Cashew cream to be exact. This makes the dish rich and creamy and is much lower in saturated fat than dairy cream.
Cashew cream might be tricky to find in the supermarket but you should be able to find it in most good health food shops. You can also swap cashew cream for oat cream or soya cream, which you are more likely to find in the supermarket (my local Tesco stocks these).
A Go-To Quick Dish
Most of us live busy lives and time is precious. It’s great to be able to cook a fabulous meal from scratch but we also need options for dishes that we can throw together in a few minutes.
This dish can be prepared in the length of time is takes pasta to cook. I cheat a little with this dish by using a pre-made pasta sauce. You can choose the pasta sauce based on your own preference. You can always make your own pasts sauce from scratch but then the dish will probably take a longer to make, and this dish is aimed at time strapped people looking for something tasty and home made.
Ingredients for this Dish:
- Pasta
- Canned green lentils
- Cashew cream
- Nutritional yeast
How to Make this Dish
The first thing to do with this dish is to get your pasta on and cooking according to the packet instructions.
While the pasta is cooking you take another small pot and add your pasta sauce. While the pasta sauce is heating, drain the lentils and add them to the sauce. Then add the cashew cream. Once the sauce has been heated to eating temperature, add the nutritional yeast and stir in. Remove the sauce from the heat.
Once the pasta is ready, drain and combine with the sauce. Enjoy.
10 Minute Creamy Vegan Pasta with Lentils
Ingredients
- 330 g pasta
- 1 tin green lentils
- 30 g nutritional yeast
- 6 tbsp cashew cream
- 400 g pasta sauce
Instructions
- Cook the pasta according to the packet instructions
- While the pasta is cooking, add the pasta sauce to a small pot and heat on the hob
- Drain the lentils and add them to the pasta sauce, Add the cashew cream.
- Once the pasta sauce has reached serving temperature add the nutritonal yeast and remove from the heat.
- Drain the pasta and combine the pasta with the pasta sauce.
