Daddy is cooking vegan dishes

Once upon a time, Jean-Louis used to cook once every two weeks or once a month. It's been so long ago, I don't remember which. Needless to say he doesn't cook much and has very little interest in cooking. I am perfectly okay with this since I love to cook. He helps out by washing dishes :)

Lately, Jean-Louis has been obsessed with the idea of becoming vegan. We have had plenty of discussions about this every day. Discussions have now turned into arguments. I don't even want to get into this here so I'll just say that Jean-Louis is back on board cooking once in awhile. When he cooks, he will cook vegan and I will assist in grocery purchasing, cooking supervision, and the occasional assistance in the kitchen.

This past weekend, we purchased the last few items he needed to make his meaty spinach pesto lasagna. I have to say I was pretty skeptical at first because it contained fake meat and fake cheese. I didn't look at the recipe beforehand myself since I wanted to leave it all to Jean-Louis. As the dish came together though, the house smelled of fresh pesto and roasted nuts. As it turns out, the vegan lasagna exceeded my expectations. Then again, my expectations were pretty low :) For a vegan dish, I thought it was very good. Now, if we had made it vegetarian and substituted the soy mozzarella with real cheese, it would have been pretty close to awesome I think! It was a complete meal and loaded with healthy stuff like spinach, garlic, tomatos, walnuts, cauliflower, and tofu. We couldn't find tofu ricotta anywhere so we just used plain tofu. Now that I look at the recipe, I see that we had to make that! Dude! Jean-Louis must have missed that point. We were all over town at Choices, Whole Foods, and specialty stores looking for tofu ricotta! A non-existent fake cheese. I guess next time I will look at his recipes beforehand:(

 

The vegan lasagna turned out good. For Jean-Louis' return to cooking, I thought he did well. It did take him three hours to do this one dish, plus chickpea nibbles. He was completely exhausted afterwards :) The hard work paid off though since Tristan ate all of his dinner that night! We also had leftovers for the next day and we froze some for lazy nights :)