Hi, it’s Fluffy the Vegan Unicorn here,

I hope you’ve enjoyed our posts up to now. I hope you realized how important some of the topics are for discussion and to be aware of as we continue towards making a better world for ourselves and animals. I know some of it can be hard to learn about and hear/read, but I feel it is very necessary to address before we can have a magic rainbow unicorn party across the land and seas.

The remainder of this week’s theme posts will be more lighthearted and less serious. Tomorrow I will go back a bit to the initial few days’ sentiments, freeing ourselves of guilt and shame over food and our bodies, and share my vegan dessert food pyramid. On Sunday I will be sharing a unicorn worthy salad, in case that’s more your speed. Unicorns like to make everyone’s different tastes happy.

Today is keeping with MoFo’s Daily theme, Vegan Cheese is Real Cheese. Just because the cheese is dairy free doesn’t make it any less real. Who is to say what cheese really is, anyways? The FDA? USDA? Some kind of patent office? I don’t know, but they fail us all the time.

Last night I inspired Laura with my magic energy to create for me a creamy vegan mac and cheese sauce made of rainbows. While the recipe will still be tweaked a bit further after this post is shared, it is at least, edible and quite a beauty.

The recipe starts by making cashew cream and boiling cauliflower and onions and blending in some other seasonings and nondairy milk. Then you separate the sauces into 5 portions and add color!

This recipe uses all natural powders such as beet for red, turmeric for yellow and orange, and butterfly pea tea powder for blue. Most of these are easy to find, except the butterfly pea tea powder. It also uses fresh spinach blended into the sauce for the green. Laura considered using spirulina but she and I don’t like the taste of it, so she opted for doing the spinach instead.

What even is butterfly pea tea powder? Butterfly pea tea powder comes from Thailand where a type of gorgeous blue flower grows. They make it into tea powder. It is caffeine free and does not have much of a taste. Laura bought it on Amazon because the other websites she found it on were out of the US and charged a lot of taxes and such. Make sure you get the powder and not the dried leaves, although I suppose if you have a good food processor or spice grinder you could make it yourself. A little ends up going a long way, so don’t worry if you see the package and think it is small.

Anyways, without further ado, may I present you my magical rainbow vegan mac and cheese:

Ingredients:

• 1 small head of cauliflower, chopped into pieces, stem and leaves removed
• 1 small onion, chopped roughly
• 1 cup raw cashews soaked in water overnight
• 1 cup water
• 2 tbsp potato starch
• 1 tablespoon white miso or chickpea miso
• 1 teaspoon garlic powder
• 1/2 cup nutritional yeast
• 1 tablespoon lemon juice
• 2 cups unsweetened plain nondairy milk
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon black pepper

For the red sauce:

• 1/2 tablespoon beet powder

For the yellow/orange sauce:

• 1/2 tablespoon turmeric powder

For the green sauce:

• A handful of baby spinach

For the blue sauce:

• A little less than 1/2 tablespoon butterfly pea tea powder

For the purple sauce:

• 1 teaspoon beet powder and 1 tsp butterfly pea tea powder

• 1 lb elbow pasta, gluten-free if necessary

Directions:

1. Boil cauliflower and onion in water for 10 minutes or until soft.
2. Blend cashews and water in a blender until smooth.
3. When the cauliflower and onions are as soft as my unicorn mane, drain them, rinse under cold water, and add to the blender along with the cashew cream.
4. Add all ingredients up to the nondairy milk. You may need to slowly add the milk instead of putting it all at once to prevent an ugly overflow mess in your blender. Blend until creamy and smooth.
5. Meanwhile, cook the pasta according to package directions. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
6. Now for the magic part. Separate the sauce into 5 equal portions as best as you can, leaving one portion in the blender.
7. Blend the spinach into the sauce that’s in the blender until it becomes a light, natural shade of green.
8. Stir in the powders to each individual portion one by one until they become vibrant and brightly beautiful.
9. When the pasta is cooked, grease a casserole or lasagna dish and pour the pasta inside.
10. Spread out each color of the rainbow in stripes in order of the handy acronym ROY G BIV (except we are not doing the orange and indigo). To make it easier, you may want to start by placing a stripe of the red to the far left first, and then doing the purple to the far right so you know how much space you have for the other colors in between. It would make us all sad if your rainbow was missing colors.
11. Cook the pasta in the oven for 20-25 minutes.
12. When serving, try to get a taste of all the colors. Just don’t swirl them too much or they become a muddy, poopy, un-unicorn ugly, gross color.
13. Enjoy this savory rainbow of vegan cheezy goodness!