My Go-To Vegan Dinner Recipes

Today we are making my go-to three vegan recipes that I make all the time. Let's start by making creamy lemon pepper chickpeas. Now you can use canned chickpeas for this recipe, but since I'm making such a large batch for my family of eight, I prefer to use dry chickpeas. So just about an hour before it's time to cook dinner, I take the bag of chickpeas, I put it in my Instant Pot with about three times more water and a little bit of kombu, and then I'll cook it for 40 minutes. I make sure to also add salt so that there's a little bit of flavor on the chickpeas before we make the meal. I'm going to be making rice for two of the recipes today, and while I usually make rice in my Instant Pot, I want to show you another really simple, easy method. I love this because you don't actually have to measure anything. Let me show you. You'll take your rice, and just as much as you think you'll need, which I'm actually gonna use the rest of what I have, and you'll put it in a pan. Then you'll add a little bit of water, and then we'll just kind of do a sweep around, and then we'll rinse out the rice so anything that's not rice usually comes out of that. It's just a quick rinse, but it makes a difference. Next, I'll add about three times more water than rice. Then we'll boil this just like pasta. Boiling rice just like pasta tends to be a really effective way to cook rice because there is usually trace amounts of arsenic found on rice, and this way it kind of washes out with the water as you dump out the excess water after cooking the rice. For the lemon pepper chickpeas, you will chop up one large onion. And we will water saute our onion with about six cloves of garlic. I added some water in here. That's one, two, three, four, five, six. While that is sauteing, I'm going to take the zest of two lemons and just grate that right into the pan. This is where a lot of the flavor is going to come from. That's one, and then we'll do our second lemon. Now that the onions are nice and sauteed, we'll add two cups of veggie broth, but I use water, and then this Better Than Bouillon veggie paste. I'm always pretty generous with my bouillon paste just because I like a lot of flavor. Next up, we will add about a teaspoon of black pepper. Now, if you don't love pepper, you can make this closer to half a teaspoon, but I like that lemon pepper taste, so it's going to be closer to about a teaspoon. You can also kind of eyeball it. Okay, just opened my chickpeas. I'm going to take out this kombu. You don't eat it. I'll just throw it away. And then we will rinse these. If you didn't cook your chickpeas from dried beans, it's fine. Just add two cans of chickpeas. Otherwise, it's about four cups of chickpeas. So here, without smooshing them. One, two, three, four. Now I'll turn the heat on low and add in the juice of these two lemons. My son was having this for dinner the other day, and he's like, oh, I just bit into something sour. Like, you're the winner. You're the one who got the seeds that I couldn't find. Perfect. Mix that around. Next, I'll add a tablespoon of dried parsley. Now we need to add some cream. If you are wanting to avoid coconut milk or you hate coconut milk, you can actually just use any type of plant milk. I'm using light coconut milk to keep the saturated fat down a little bit lower, but it's going to be about a half of a cup of, for me, this is light coconut milk, but you can add any type of milk or cream that you prefer. Now, once this comes in, you'll see it's super creamy. Yum, this is perfect. And then you'll want to taste it from here and add salt if you feel like you need to. Because I used a lot of the veggie broth, I don't think I need salt. That is perfect. Then we top it off with a handful of chopped spinach, just to bring in more color, a little more nutrients, and it gets my kids to eat spinach without them really thinking about it. We'll mix that in, and it's ready to serve. So the rice is done. I cooked a ton of rice. You can see there's a lot of extra water. So we'll just dump that out. What I love about these two recipes is it makes a lot of food. So I don't have to cook for a few days. And then I will rinse out this rice as well. If you have extra chickpeas from the lemon pepper chickpeas, you can just put it in a jar to leave in your fridge to use for later. Next, let's make my go-to rice and beans recipe. It's super simple, and I love to make this one when I haven't thought about what to make for dinner. As long as I have enough time in advance to make the beans in my Instant Pot, it works. But this also works with canned beans if you're in a pinch. Just like with the chickpeas, I made these beans earlier by placing them with about three times more water than beans, adding about a tablespoon of salt, and then placing that kombu seaweed in there to help with any added gas or bloating. And you definitely want to do this with pinto beans because they tend to cause more gas and bloating than other beans. I don't always think ahead long enough to soak them beforehand, but I know if I add this seaweed, it will help a lot. And you want to make sure to rinse out all of this water. And this is how you get beans that don't cause gas and bloating. Now let's add them to the pan. This was about one pound of dried pinto beans, or about two cups, and it yields six cups of beans. So if you're using canned beans, keep in mind that you want about six cups total. I'll turn the heat on and then add three cups of veggie broth or three cups water with three teaspoons of Better Than Bouillon seasoning. And again, I'm pretty generous with the seasoning, usually like a heaping teaspoon. Next, you'll add one tablespoon of oregano, again, a heaping tablespoon, and one tablespoon of cumin. And that's where all the flavor comes from. This recipe is simple. We're almost done. This will cook for about five minutes until it starts to boil, just to bring in all the flavors. And then I'll turn it off the heat and add the juice of either a lime or a lemon. If you're liking these recipes, make sure you get your free one-week meal guide by clicking on the link below. You will absolutely love those recipes. Super simple and easy like these ones I'm showing today. This has been boiling for about five minutes. I'm gonna turn down the heat on low. And I just wanted all of those flavors to kind of cook together. And now we'll add the juice of a lemon because I don't have a lime on hand. What I do always keep in my pantry is this true, I have true lime and a true lemon, just in case I don't even have a real lemon or a lime. It's nice to have these just in case and they add the flavor too. But we'll chop this up and squeeze the juice in. This recipe is so fast. You can see why it's one of my go-tos. It's easy, it's delicious. Everyone in my family absolutely loves it. Seriously, my twins are like, rice and beans, rice and beans. Rice and beans. You can add anything else to this. Salsa, avocados, mangoes, anything. And it is delicious. Both the rice and beans and the lasagna soup recipe are found in our fall meal guide along with 99 other delicious plant-based recipes. And lastly today, we're gonna cook my famous lasagna soup. Now this one is one of my family favorites. It's so good that I've actually showed you this recipe in multiple different videos. But today I wanna show you how I make it when I don't have lasagna noodles on hand, which is more often than not. I don't love that it's really hard to find whole wheat lasagna noodles. So sometimes I just use the whole wheat noodles that I have on hand, but you do have to tweak the recipe. So I'm gonna link below the full regular recipe, but show you in today's video how you would tweak it if you don't have lasagna noodles. Because a regular box of rotini noodles or whatever noodles you have on hand is about twice as many noodles as what it calls for in the original recipe. We're just simply gonna double the recipe. But when you double it, it can burn easily. So do not saute anything in the beginning. That's the key. Don't saute the onions, just dump and then go. We'll add one to two onions chopped. Again, we're not sauteing them first. And then eight to 10 cloves of garlic. So I'm just gonna do this minced garlic. One, two, three, four, and five. And we'll add a fourth a cup of Italian seasoning. Now, as you notice, these recipes make a lot. That's because I have a lot of kids. So if you need to cut all of these recipes in half, feel free to do that. Next up is two teaspoons onion powder, one teaspoon of paprika. I'm running out of all my seasonings. You can tell I make all of these things regularly. Then you'll do two teaspoons of salt. I'm gonna add the entire small little can of tomato paste. And I opened up both ends to make it really easy to come and pull it all out. It's really cool, you gotta see this. Hold on. Then you just smush it out. Just push your fingers, and there you go. Take out the lid, and there you have it. Next, we add a full cup of red lentils. And then it'll be 10 cups of veggie broth. Each one of these is a five cup, so I'll add two of them. One and two. And then bear with me while I put in 10 teaspoons of this veggie bouillon paste. But again, you can just use 10 cups of veggie broth if you have it, so it's three. I can't talk and count. Four, five, and 10. All right, let's mix all of that together. Then we'll do two cups of marinara sauce. And then add two cups from here. One. And usually, it's the whole can. So I'll even add a little bit of water from here. Add it in there, and then shake it up to get all of that sauce. Perfect. Then we need a half a cup of nutritional yeast. I'm running out of my nutritional yeast. Seriously, running out of everything today. Just enough for this video. And then about a half a cup of, it's gonna be about a cup of canned coconut milk, because again, I'm doubling everything. I'm just gonna finish off this can. I'm using light. That works. Now we'll add in our entire box of rotini pasta. So if you are not doubling the recipe like me, you will just add half of the box. Perfect. And again, you did not saute anything, so what it does is you can see how the onions have floated up to the top. That helps to prevent burning, because there's just a lot of things that weigh down on the bottom. When you saute things and it gets really hot on the bottom, and you'll find that sometimes it will say food burn in your Instant Pot. So the easy way, if that's happening, even if you're not doubling the recipe, is just not to saute before. All right, let's cook it up. My favorite part is this recipe only takes five minutes. Five minutes. Although, you know, it takes longer than that in total. But it's quick, it's fast, it's an easy go-to. This is why I cook it so often, is because it's so fast to put together. Took me five minutes to put together, takes five minutes to cook, and it's done. The lasagna soup is done. Perfect. So now we just add in some greens and some lemon juice. I'll mix that in. I might add a little bit more. There we go. Two handfuls of spinach, and then the juice of a lemon. There we go. Super yummy. Still soupy, but you see, it's definitely doable even without lasagna noodles. And there's so much food. I'm even gonna add more spinach. I think there's plenty of room for it. If you like these recipes, make sure you check out my other super simple beginner recipes. I know you will love those as well.