Veggie Spaghetti Sauce

Who doesn't love a warm bowl of spaghetti? Actually I know someone who doesn't so don't answer that.

The beautiful thing about sauce, is that you can pretty much use it for any kind of pasta or even pour it over rice.

It's thick, hearty, heatly, spicy, nutrional and, obviously, delicious.

This on is 100% meat-free, there is very lil fat, tons of veggies. And the neat thing is, anti-veggie people wont even notice the difference.

Here is what you will need:

• 1 1/2 cup of dried soy protein (you can find it at BulkBarn)
• 1 cup of red wine
• 1 large onion, minced
• 2 carrots, chopped into small cubes
• 1 large can of tomato sauce (or homemade tomato sauce, see lasagna recipe)
• 5 tomatoes, de-seeded and chopped into small pieces
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 2 branches of celery finely chopped
• 3 large portobello mushrooms, diced
• 1/4 cup of fresh basil and thyme
• 2 tablespoons of red tobasco sauce
• salt and pepper
• Vegan butter for cooking

Alrighty! Now that we have the ingredients down, let's start cookin!

1. In a mixing bowl, pour red wine and dried soy protein, and let soak for about 5-10 minutes (while the veggies are cooking)
2. In a large sauce pan, over medium-high, melt butter and add in the onions, carrots, celery and garlic. Cook for about 5 minutes. 
3. Add to the mix, the chopped mushrooms and cook another 2-3 minutes. 
4. Drop in the tomatoes, the tomato sauce, the soy protein WITH the wine, the tobasco, fresh herbs, a pinch of salt and pepper. Mix well and let simmer for about 10 minutes. 
5. At this point you can taste it and adjust the spice and seasoning to your taste. 

And that's it! Voila! Done. Easy, right?  If you were to use the homemade tomato sauce from the lasagna recipe, I would suggest that you make a bigger batch since the sauce is pretty much the most important ingredient in this recipe.

For the soy protein, you can also omitt the wine, replace it by water or buy the already moist Yves' ground "beef". You could also make it with legumes or even quinoa.

The soy protein looks so much like ground beef that it doesn't freak out people as much when you say it's "vegan but still contains loads of protein".

If you are wondering why there aren't any pictures, well it's simply because I've decided to write down the recipe before making it tonight. I shall update the post later :)

Enjoy!