Meatless Meal from Cookbook: Fast Easy Cheap Vegan: 101 Recipes You Can Make in 30 Minutes or Less, for $10 or Less, and with 10 Ingredients or Less!

Howdy Friends! (howdoyoudo) I am going to do a little something different here today. Rather than doing a cookbook review, I am featuring a meatless meal recipe I just tired out from a cookbook I wanted to review.

The Cookbook

Fast Easy Cheap Vegan: 101 Recipes You Can Make in 30 Minutes or Less, for $10 or Less, and with 10 Ingredients or Less

When I first started searching for plant-based recipes, I found Sam Turnbull’s blog It Doesn’t Taste Like Chicken and tried a few recipes from there. I decided I needed to add one of her books to my collections, and I purchased Fast Easy Cheap Vegan: 101 Recipes You Can Make in 30 Minutes or Less, for $10 or Less, and with 10 Ingredients or Less!  I will admit it can be hard to cook plant-based meals and stay motivated to do it. I constantly remind myself of the importance of reducing meat and dairy is to our planet and how good it feels to do what I can to improve my carbon footprint. So finding cookbooks with recipes that are fast and easy with ingredients that are part of my usual diet makes me excited to keep cooking plant-based food is very rewarding.  

The recipe

Quicker Quesadillas

Quesadillas is something we love here in my house. There are easy and fast to make with ingredients that I usually have on hand. It’s a meal that doesn’t need meat as black beans work so well in them, but for me, it needs cheese. So I thought till I tried this recipe. I thought about adding cheese, but I held out to see how this recipe turned and tasted. I had my doubts, but I thought they turned out tasty without cheese! I made them in 15 mins, and this recipe is a winner for me!!!

The ingredients

I didn’t follow the recipe entirely and made a couple of changes

3 tbsp of vegan butter 

Chopped onion 

Garlic (I substituted a garlic spice blend, I will talk about that below)

¼ cup flour

1 can of coconut milk

1 can of black beans

1 cup of corn

1 tbsp of taco seasoning

1 tsp of salt

Tortillas

Salsa

The step I took to prepare

I added the chopped onion to the vegan butter in a large saucepan and the garlic spice blend and sauteed until the onions brown for a couple of minutes. I then added the flour and cooked for about a minute. Then, I added the coconut milk and stirred it to combine. I added the beans, corn and taco seasoning, and salt and let it cook for about 5 minutes as it thickened to a cheesy sauce.

I added the filling to one half of a side of a tortilla and topped it off with salsa. Then fold the other side over the top. I put them in the oven till the tortillas turned brown and crispy.

My thoughts on the recipe

The coconut milk used to make the sauce made for a great alternative to cheese, and I liked its consistency, making it a good choice for a filling for quesadillas. It had a coconut taste that first tasted odd, but after a few bites, all the flavors worked well together.

I think that adding Kale to the quesadillas would work well. I didn’t have any on hand to add, and it felt like something green was needed. So next time I make them, I am adding some kale to them.

The spice blend (Rocky Mountain) I used is a handcrafted spice blend of garlic, sea salt, onion, pepper spices by Copper Spice Co, located in Edmonton, AB. Their spices blends are handcrafted in small batches using freshly ground spices and herbs.