Photos by Lindsey Johnson

This is the first recipe I developed that used cashews to make a creamy sauce. Memories! Misty, cashew-colored memories. There are other ways to mimic the creaminess of dairy in a vegan recipe, but using cashews is my favorite method by far. It’s easy, the ingredients in cashew creams are unprocessed whole foods, and cashew creams are delicious. I make cashew cream so often that I bought a Magic Bullet pretty much dedicated to all things cashew.

The base of most cashew sauces is soaked raw cashews and water. I always add a little oil too. If you want a cheesy sauce, a little lemon juice will add tang and nutritional yeast adds pungency (I was going to say “cheesy funk,” but “funk” is not a word you want to associate with food, is it?). I nearly always add some garlic for flavor and in the case of this Mushroom and Kale Lasagna, I also added some fresh rosemary.



Cashew cream performs best when you combine it with already cooked food — tossed with pasta just before serving, for example. If you bake it in the oven, it has a tendency to dry out a bit. When baking this lasagna, it’s important to cover it with foil and keep it covered the whole way through. There’s no cheese to brown on top, so keeping it covered is fine! This will help the lasagna stay creamy in the middle.

This December, we’re republishing updated recipes from Oh My Veggies’ first year. This post was originally published on June 21, 2011.