The Proposal Vegan Protein Sauce for Pasta and More – High in Protein, High in Flavor!
by Anne P. Mitchell, Esq. – attorney, law professor emeritus, part-time gluten-free vegan chef :~)
You will not *believe* that this creamy pasta sauce is made from tofu, nor how easy it is to make! It’s what I call a “dump” recipe – because you dump everything into a blender, give it a whirl, and voila!
First, right off the bat, you need to know that this is my riff on Sarah Bond’s most excellent High Protein Marry Me Tofu Sauce.
So why “Marry Me” and then why my “The Proposal”? The history of “Marry Me” recipes starts with Lindsay Funston’s “Marry Me Chicken” which she published in Delish in 2016. But the concept for “Marry Me {Dish}” actually goes all the way back to 1986, when the mother of them all, Engagement Chicken, was published in Glamour magazine. Lore has it that any time a Glamour staffer made this dish, their boyfriends immediately proposed. That eventually morphed into and triggered the “Marry Me” recipe craze, which took storm on TikTok and other social media platforms.
Which brings me to my recipe. As many of you know, I am on permanent medical isolation, and so use as many shelf-stable ingredients as I can, because I can’t get out to the grocery store for perishable ingredients. When I saw Sarah Bond’s High Protein Marry Me Tofu Sauce I immediately thought “I wonder if I can adapt this to use shelf-stable tofu?”
You see it’s not as simple a straight one-to-one conversion; refrigerated tofu has a very different consistency than does the boxed, shelf-stable stuff. What’s more, the refrigerated stuff is several ounces heavier – 16 ounces to the shelf-stable’s 10.8 ounces.
Well, it turns out that I could adapt it! And I did adapt it! But I didn’t want to jump on the “Marry Me” bandwagon (much though I would indeed love to be married again some day!); so I opted for “Proposal”.
I put about half of this over a healthy serving of gluten-free penne, as you can see in the picture.
The other half I ended up eating as a dip with some almond flour crackers – and, to be honest, some of it I just ate with a spoon. :~)
Here’s the recipe:
