Vegannosaurus Rex

In retrospect, after looking at the photos, this recipe wasn’t as much of a failure as I had once thought. I attempted a rather ambitious undertaking. My version falls under the category ‘looks better in the cookbook’ but the flavor, texture, aesthetics in general, were all spot on. I made this recipe for raw vegan meatloaf from The Daily Raw Cafe.

Start with a sun-dried tomato ketchup:

• 1 cup sun-dried tomato, soaked, 1/4 c reserved water
• 1/4 cup raisins, soaked
• 1 tablespoon Italian Seasonings
• 1/4 tablespoon chopped onion
• 1 clove garlic, minced

chop 2-4 cups (recipe calls for 2 cups, i found that to be far less than i actually needed) of spinach and place in a Ziploc bag with 2 tablespoons of olive oil, juice from half a lemon, and 1 teaspoon of sea salt for an hour. This gets the spinach tender and juicy.

blend 2 cups walnuts (soaked for 4-6 hours), 1 cup almonds (soaked 4-6 hours), 1 cup soaked sun-dried tomatoes, 1/2 cup reserved tomato water, 2 tablespoons parsley, 4 chopped green onions, 1 clove garlic and 2 stalks of celery. Add the remaining 1/2 cup water one tablespoon at a time to moisten the meat loaf. This can’t be understated, be careful when adding the water, it is very easy to over moisten the ‘meat’.

blended meat should look something like below, mine was a little too moist. Blend with 2 teaspoons of sea salt and 1 teaspoon of black pepper.

spread the meatloaf mixture on baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Form the mixture in the shape of multiple rectangles approximately 2 inches my 8 inches. Cover the top of the spread meatloaf mixture with marinated spinach and roll. The result should look something similar to the picture below. Two notes about this step of the process.

#1: my mixture was too moist, which made it a little difficult to roll, if you monitor the moisture closely the rolling shouldn’t be a problem.

#2: the original recipe calls for a dehydrator, which i do not own. I try to compensate for this shortcoming by setting my oven to 100 degrees and use that as my version of a dehydrator. In theory as long as it doesn’t get above 118 degrees then the food remains raw. I had the oven set a little too high in this case, as you can see from the results…

cover rolls with sun-dried tomato ketchup.

slice and cover with more sun-dried tomato ketchup. As i stated earlier, i had my oven temp set a little too high (it was a mistake on my part) and the result looks a little ‘cooked’, although it didn’t taste that way. As long as the temp of the over stays around 100 degrees i think this recipe will turn out as expected. If nothing else it was delicious.