dinner | Vegan Recipes from Cassie Howard (2024)

Last year, a friend of mine told me she was eating a gluten-free diet and told me that instead of pasta, she often ate spaghetti squash for meals. So, being a skeptic, I was all “pffft, I bet it tastes nothing like pasta and everything like mushy squash”.

She made me some for lunch a few days later, with a roasted red pepper sauce, and steamed veggies and YOU GUYS. It was AMAAAAAAZING!

I now eat spaghetti squash whenever I can get my hands on it. Which is all the time now that it’s fall and squash is in every grocery store, around every corner, all over the place.

Recently, I’ve been playing with my recipes to be a bit more simple, and most as side dishes, as opposed to the star of the show.

This dish is my favourite. It is

Creamy
Bright
Soft
Garlic-y
Simple
Healthy
Rich
Absolutely Delicious

I usually serve it with some grilled tofu steaks, mashed taters and steamed veggies. Or I just shovel it in my mouth on it’s own. I won’t judge you if you do the same.

Okay FINE. It’s fall. I get it. I’m accepting the cold weather that won’t seem to go away. I’m accepting that soon enough, my kitchen will be bursting at the seems with all things pumpkin (no complaints there!). I’m accepting that OMG CHRISTMAS IS COMING.

I suppose I should get going on my shopping then, huh?

But first – chili. Smoky barbecue chili. To help ease my pain of no more summer.

This is such a fun change from the regular chili that I make. I love adding Sweet Baby Ray’s barbecue sauce, because I find it has a sweet, smoky flavour that is really delicious in chili. I also added smoked paprika because, why not? Smoky goodness up in huuuurrrrr.

You don’t have to feel bad eating this chili either. It’s loaded with veggies, veggies, and more veggies. And with a silky white drizzle of delicious, homemade vegan sour cream added on top?

Hot damn! This is a tasty meal. A tasty, healthy meal that I ate two bowls of last week. In a row. I am not ashamed!

Hello, my name is Cassie, and I’m still holding on to summer with all I’ve got. Will. Not. Let. It. Go.

Considering I’ve switched from shorts and t-shirts to pants and sweaters in less than a week, I think it’s safe to say that summer has abruptly just up and left me, without even saying goodbye.

Which just means YAY, FALL FOODS TIME! But it also means summer is gone, and also, much of my fave summer meals. Boo. So let’s give summer one last hurrah, shall we?

This is a big, monster vegan taco salad that I whipped up on a whim the other day, hoping it would bring summer back to me (it didn’t), and it ended up being one of my most favourite salads that I made all summer.

It’s loaded with veggies, quinoa, vegan taco meat and a healthy drizzle of oh-so-good green sauce. It makes my tummy happy.

I also added crushed up tortilla chips (Neil Brothers are THE BEST!) on top, because duh, that’s just obvious. It added a nice salty, crunchy flair to the dish. It also kinda sorta helped with getting my two picky kids to eat a meal full of VEGETABLES.

Goodbye summer, you will be missed! And please… let fall last awhile before old man winter comes along! Pumpkin EVERYTHING is calling my name…

Fall is in the air. Can you smell it?

Though it’s not technically fall yet, I have already started making fall foods, because fall foods are the BEST EVER EVER.

Like this sweet potato shepherd’s pie. Gluten-free and loaded with good stuff like lentils, peas, carrots and corn. Perfect for fall.

You can really add any veggies you’d like to this dish, but I’ve always loved corn, peas and carrots. Along with celery, onions and garlic for some flavour, of course. I also swapped the traditional potato topping and used sweet potato instead.

Sweet potato:

Is a good source of magnesium (which helps with relaxation)
Is a source ofvitamin D, which is hard to get in a vegan diet
Is naturally sweet-tasting
Contains almost twice as much fiber than other types of potatoes
Is good for your heart

So go ahead – stuff your face with sweet potatoes!

I love the hint of sweetness that the sweet potato brings to this dish. Itreally balances nicely with the vegetables and seasonings.

I always add a sprinkle of paprika on top of my shepherd’s pie, both for flavour and because it looks pretty. And good looking food just tastes better. It’s a fact. Look it up.

So let’s eat up, my friend! This sweet potato shepherd’s pie is not gonna last long around me – get it while you can!

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of quinoa bowls. They’re easy, they don’t take long to make, you can prepare them in advance, they’re a simple solution to excess food in your fridge that needs to be used up, AND they travel well. If those aren’t good enough reasons for you to go make yourself a quinoa bowl RIGHTTHISSECOND, I don’t know what is.

I often make pretty simple quinoa bowls because I can’t be bothered to slave away in the kitchen for hours on end (usually). So recently, I made this bad boy.

And he was YUM. Only 3 things in my quinoa bowl (including the quinoa) and a delicious, savoury dressing smothered on top. Awww yea! It doesn’t look like much, but it was perfect. The dressing really makes this bowl, though, so if you skip it, you will have a very sad, bland, boring quinoa bowl on your hands.

I’m still working on getting my little ones to eat quinoa bowls, but they are stubborn! They’ll eat the quinoa, but only if it’s plain. One of them will eat the lentils, but only if the other one isn’t around telling her how “gross” they are.

Sigh. One of these days my kids will like more than just bread and chocolate – right? Please tell me I’m right!

So – on to this delicious quinoa bowl masterpiece [not]…

First, cook up some quinoa and divide between bowls. Cook up some lentils and do the same. While those two are cooking, sautee some greens with a tiny bit of oil, salt, and black pepper. Then, make the dressing.

Ta-da! No muss, no fuss. Simple, easy, delicious.

What is it about bacon that makes people go crazy? Bacon made from pigsor not – people love the stuff! Myself included (vegan bacon, of course).

One of the most common things people ask when they find out I don’t eat animal products is: “but how can you not eat bacon?!”. They are seriously confused as to how I could give up strips of pig fat (because really, that’s all bacon is).

It’s one of the main reasons a lot of my friends and family won’t go vegan. THE BACON. And THE CHEESE. They’re so addicted to these “foods” that they can’t even fathom giving them up, ever.

So I decided to find a bunch of vegan bacon recipes, to show them that you can be vegan AND eat your dang bacon!

8 Vegan Bacon Recipes

1.Easy Tofu Bacon

2.Crispy Mushroom Bacon

3.Crazy Good Coconut Bacon

4.Bacon-Flavoured Almond Slivers

5.Easy Tempeh Bacon

6.Vegan Bacon from King Oyster Mushrooms

7.Delicious sh*take Bacon

8.Raw Vegan Bacon

Take a look at all of that yummy vegan bacon! Who wouldn’t be satisfied with so many options for bacon? My favourite is coconut bacon & tofu bacon – they are both super easy to make. Mushroom-based bacon is tasty, too!

What is your favourite vegan bacon recipe?

Have you ever made a recipe that was SO GOOD that you just couldn’t wait to shout it from the rooftops and tell all of your friends? Well, I have. (Often.) And this is one of those recipes.

This past weekend, I was struggling with my menu plan. Nothing on it sounded interesting to me. I needed to change it up. So I did what I always do when I can’t think of what to make: I turned to my dear friend Pinterest. She gets me. She solves all of my [food-related] problems.

While I was browsing Pinterest, I came across this older recipe from Angela – Heat Wave Summer Salad. I wouldn’t say we were having a heat wave that day, but we certainly were experiencing a really hot summer’s day, so I checked out the recipe.

And…. I’m not gonna lie, I almost went back to searching Pinterest. Wheatberries with peaches and berries? Plus chickpeas and sauteed greens? What? How does that even work?! And the dressing has mustard and CINNAMON.

Everything just sounded so… weird. Like, there’s no way that combination of food would actually work.

And then I remembered that it was Angela sharing the recipe, not some random person that just started a food blog 2 weeks ago. Angela is a well-respected vegan food blogger, and has been for years – there’s no way she would post a recipe that tasted weird!

So, I decided to give it a go.

And all I can say is – YOU HAVE TO MAKE THIS RECIPE. Holy wow is it ever good. The ingredientscombine so well, and it’s like a flavour explosion in your mouth with every bite. The dressing, as weird as it sounded to me in the beginning, really helps pull everything together and make it a well-rounded, satisfying dish.

This recipe makes a lot, but I don’t suggest cutting it in half, unless you’re just making the recipe for one person. Because, hello – LEFTOVERS!

I had leftovers of this yummy meal for lunch yesterday and it was marvelous. Just as good as when I’d made it the day before.

So don’t be weirded out by the ingredients in this dish. Just trust me (and Angela) when I say that this recipe is AMAZZZZZING.

I have never met a Caesar salad I didn’t like, but this recipe – this recipe is the best. BEST Caesar salad recipe ever, ever, ever.

That is no lie. It’s the absolute best vegan Caesar salad I have made, and every Caesar lover that has tried it agrees.

The dressing is smooth and creamy, perfectly coating every piece of romaine lettuce. With just a hint of liquid smoke, the dressing gets that bacon taste that traditional Caesar salad has – without using bacon. Yippie!

Liquid smoke, where have you been all my life?

I like to keep my Caesar pretty simple, with dressing and homemade croutons, but you can definitely add other things, such as meat substitutes, sprouts, chickpeas, or lentils.

If you’re a big Caesar salad lover like me – you MUST try this recipe! Then report back and tell me what you thought!

Also, some big news ’round these parts: this is my 100th post on the site! 100 posts since I first started blogging about delicious vegan food in March of this year. YAY!

Thank you so much for reading. I love sharing my passion forvegan food, and I appreciate you for reading these words that I write, scoping out the photos that I take (that are nowhere near as awesome as myfavourite food bloggers photos are), and trying out the recipes that I create. I’m honoured that you visit me each week!