Meatless Monday with Vegan Pasta and Cold Sauce

Hello and welcome (back) to the Miratel blog for another Meatless Monday vegan recipe share. As you may know, Miratel took the Meatless Monday pledge as it encourages eliminating meat from your diet one day per week to preserve the health of our planet (and ourselves!). We consider our support of this great movement part of our CSR business strategies as it spreads awareness of the impact of our food choices on our environment.

Making a great vegan meal might seem daunting, but we’re here to help take the guesswork out of what to make for dinner. With the weather warming up, you might be feeling an inclination to cook less and eat lighter and today’s recipe checks both boxes. On the menu today is a delicious take on the traditional pasta with marinara sauce that you might be used to. Our recipe for vegan pasta with cold sauce comes courtesy of the ever-reliable Food52 and proves you don’t have to slave over a hot stove to have good pasta. Let’s get cooking.

Ingredients (serves 4):

• 1 #10 can crushed tomatoes
• 3 cups packed fresh basil
• 7 cloves garlic or more
• 1/3 cup extra vigin olive oil
• salt and pepper to taste
• 1 pound spaghetti

Directions

1. Use a food processor to finely chop basil or it can be done by hand. In a large bowl empty the canned tomatoes, basil, garlic, salt and pepper. Mix these ingredients together and refrigerate overnight. When you’re ready to use, remove from the refrigerator and add oil, stir well. In the meantime, cook the pasta al dente, drain and add the sauce. The hot pasta will warm the cold sauce. No cheese please…it’s not needed. This recipe makes enough to make 2 complete dinners, or keep remaining sauce in the fridge for when you are making pizza.

Ideally this sauce should be made at least 1 day in advance so flavours can better marry together. To complete this meal, serve with a large leafy green salad with your favourite vinaigrette along with some crusty bread.

This is what reviewer drbabs had to say about the experience making this recipe: “Almost as easy as opening a jar of premade sauce, but much more delicious and versatile. I used a 750 ml box of Pomi crushed tomatoes and cut the rest of the ingredients to 1/3 (1 cup basil, 2 cloves garlic, 2 TB olive oil), and that seemed about right. For the garlic; I smashed 2 cloves and let them sit in the sauce overnight, then fished them out the next day — this gave the sauce a garlic essence without overpowering it. However, raw garlic lovers could just mince up the cloves and keep them in the sauce. It certainly was nice to put everything together the night before and not heat up the kitchen.” Well said.

If you haven’t already, we encourage you to visit the Meatless Monday website and join us in taking the pledge today. Spread the word at home and at work and promote CSR business initiatives to make your green call centre, office, factory, shop, restaurant or salon even greener.

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Miratel Solutions is a Toronto call centre, eBusiness, and letter shop mail house specializing in professional fundraising services including PCI compliant inbound telephone fundraising, outbound telephone fundraising, online fundraising, lottery fundraising services, donation processing and receipting and direct mail fundraising services. We are committed to our CSR business values in all our business decisions  and advancing the missions of the nonprofits we proudly serve.