The Happy Gluten Free Vegan

We start off our review series of gluten-free vegan hot dogs (also called frankfurters or franks) with Moving Mountains brand vegan hot dogs. These are gluten-free by accident, meaning that Moving Mountains didn’t set out to intentionally create a hot dog that was gluten-free as well as vegan, but create it they did. While Moving Mountains started out in 2016 by creating vegan hamburgers (not gluten-free), and added vegan hot dogs (yay, gluten-free!) to their repertoire in 2019.

The winner of the best vegan hot dogs is…. There are a total of three brands of gluten-free vegan hot dogs or gluten-free veggie hot dogs (a/k/a frankfurters or franks) on the market right now (Lightlife are not fully gluten-free): Sweet Earth vegan hot dogs (which are gluten-free by chance), Moving Mountains vegan hot dogs (also gluten-free by chance, not as an intention), and Yeah Dawg, which are not only vegan but also gluten-free by design. In this review series we will review each of them one at a time, giving our impression of them (taste, texture, ease of cooking, etc.). We’d love to know what you think of them too. (Side note: Why the heck do so many vegan things have to have gluten in them?? :~( )

Our copycat recipe for Jujube Date and Walnut is not only better than the original, but gives you other options as well! The Jujube Date & Walnuts (basically walnut-stuffed dates) are very popular, particularly with the Vegan Costco crowd, but Costco is discontinuing them, so if you are missing your date & walnut fix, this Copycat Jujube date and walnut recipe is for you. It’s also for you if you would just like to make your own, and happily you can get both organic dates and organic walnuts at Costco (the Jujubes are not organic). Now, you might think that shoving a walnut into a date hardly qualifies as a recipe, and ordinarily you’d be right. However we do things with dates and walnuts that you may not have considered (yes, as we read that we realized that it could sound kind of naughty, but we’re ok with that. :~) ).

Our chocolate chip raw cookie dough protein balls are easy and fun to make, and have lots of flavor and plenty of protein. What they don’t have is gluten, animal products, refined sugar, or weird ingredients that you don’t want in your food. In fact, they have just 5 ingredients: dates, almonds, vanilla protein powder, vanilla extract, and chocolate chips. They also have a secret: While they are fantastic as is, they are amazing if you heat them up in an air fryer for a few minutes, or in the microwave for a few seconds! Then they come this magical best of all worlds, raw cookie dough with warm gushy chocolate chips!

Our recipe for gluten-free vegan Soy Curl bacon hit us like a bolt out of the blue (only way less painful). Vegan bacon from Soy Curls?? Why the heck not? We had recently posted our wildly popular recipe for Soy Curl pastrami, and so it wasn’t really a stretch to go from pastrami to bacon. Of course vegan bacon is something of a holy grail. There are lots products on the market that call themselves vegan bacon, and even more recipes for vegan bacon, most involving coconut, tempeh, seaweed, and even the aptly named seitan (oh hush, if you need to be gluten-free you know what we mean). But bacon from Soy Curls beats them all (at least we think so), because it has the flavor, it has the nutrition, and it has the CRISP!

Ok you know what maple-glazed means, but, you may be thinking, what the heck is cedar-planked? Or maybe you are already familiar with the more traditional maple-glazed cedar-planked salmon, which was all the rage among foodies some years ago. Regardless, cedar-planked means that the food is literally baked or roasted on a cedar plank in your oven! It’s amazing because it imparts this slightly sweet, slightly smoky, slightly cedary flavor.

Is there any more quintessentially hippie food than chunky, crunchy granola? Especially if it’s a gluten-free, vegan, healthy granola? Heck, even the very term “crunchy” is often used to describe someone who is perceived as hippie-like! Well, hippie or not, you will love our homemade “chunky crunchy granola” recipe, it’s easy to make, readily customizable, gluten-free, vegan, and DELICIOUS!

Wondering what to do with that Himalayan salt block that someone gave you for Christmas years ago? Cooking tofu on a salt block makes wonderful, delicious tofu! Of course we think tofu is wonderful anyways, but in case you’re on the fence, this is how to make tofu taste good. (Plus we include an awesome 4-ingredient marinade for tofu!) Some people have a hard time wrapping their head around cooking on a block of salt; it helps to understand that you are basically using the salt block as a griddle (and it will be just as hot as a griddle). While salt block cooking is typically thought of in the context of meat and grilling, cooking tofu on your big old block of salt, on your stove top in your kitchen, yields a tofu unlike any other.

Our homemade vegan pastrami recipe is so good that it has been judged “perfect” even by pastrami-loving carnivores! Have it plain, make a vegan pastrami reuben, or toss it with noodles and sauerkraut! And it’s not even complicated to make, in fact making our vegan pastrami recipe is easy! Now, of course, your vegan pastrami from Soy Curls won’t be in thin slices, but it will be in strips, perfect for putting on a sandwich with some delicious deli mustard, or with sauerkraut, vegan Russian dressing, and vegan cheese for that vegan pastrami reuben!

No matter what you call it (‘halva’, ‘halvah’, “halava”, or “halavah”), vegan halvah is the holy grail of halvas for many people. If you, as we, grew up eating Joyva brand halvah, you may have been as stunned as were we to discover that Joyva halvah, and many other brands of halva, are not vegan! WTF? That’s right! Some brands contain egg white or albumin, others contain honey, and some even have both.

We call this easy tofu marinade and sauce our “6 x 1” marinade (pronounced “six by one”, or just “six by”) because it consists of one tablespoon of each of six ingredients (plus some water). It’s super simple, in fact deceptively simple. We say “deceptively” because it’s one of those recipes that people will think you spent waaaay more time and effort on than you actually did. We love those kinds of recipes.

If you are trying to figure out how to find out if your Costco has something in stock, we’re here to tell you! It would be nice if you could check Costco inventory online, like with an in-store items search, and while you can’t do that, exactly, there are ways to find out if your Costco has something that you want before you make a trip or place a delivery order.

If you have been putting off making vegan sushi (or maybe never even thought of making homemade vegan sushi rolls), stop it! It turns out that making vegan sushi rolls at home is really easy! Stymied for vegan sushi filling ideas? Guess what! You can use almost anything as a filling for vegan sushi! Is it authentic? Who cares! It’s delicious, and fun! We’ve used string beans, rehydrated dried mushrooms, and baby corn (because that’s what we had on hand), as well as ordering and using more traditional things such as ume. There’s even a vegan unagi (eel) sauce you can get to replicate vegan unagi (hey, it’s all about the sauce)! On a side note, who here remembers the ‘unagi’ episode of Friends? (Are we dating ourselves?)

So many vegan tofu recipes seem the same, are we right? That’s what makes this tofu dish so unexpected! Figs and cashews in an asian-style tofu dish? Whodda thunk it! (Us, that’s who!) Not only is this tofu recipe a refreshing change from the expected, but it’s delicious! Serve it over brown or white rice, with some steamed bok choi or spinach on the side, and you have an incredible meal! We use the House brand tofu from Costco for this, as well as the unroasted cashews from Costco, and the organic dried figs from Costco.

Ready to have your mind blown? These amazing chocolate cherry truffles are not only not bad for you, they are positively good for you! And yet they are freakin’ delicious! They even have protein in them, in fact we thought about calling them ‘chocolate cherry protein truffles’ but we were afraid the name would scare people off before they tried them; they are literally vegan truffles that taste amazing, but just happen to also have protein and be good for you. They are the ultimate in guilt-free sweets! And they are easy to make and economical as well (in fact all of the ingredients are available at Costco)!

This awesome tofu marinade works in your air fryer as well as in your oven. It makes tofu cubes that are as versatile as they are delicious, with perfectly done outsides and incredible creamy centers. There are as many marinade recipes for tofu as there are, well, maybe not stars in the sky, but there are a lot of tofu marinade recipes, and we will put this one up against any of them. The secret to this easy, incredible marinade and its fabulous, magical alchemy with tofu is in how you press the tofu, and then letting the tofu marinate for a good long time. For this recipe it is imperative that you use the type of tofu that is found packed in water, in the refrigerated section. We use the House brand tofu from Costco for this, and it’s perfect.

Want a vegan recipe for copycat Fiddle Faddle, copycat Cracker Jacks, or copycat Screaming Yellow Zonkers (what a name) popcorn? This is it! Our recipe for oven-baked candy-coated popcorn is easy to make, and hard to resist. And our recipe is sooooo much cleaner than any of Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Cracker Jack, or Fiddle Faddle. That’s the lovely thing about making your own versions of beloved favorites, you not only know exactly what goes into it, but you can control what goes into it, and keep out the nasties.

Want to make a gluten-free vegan shepherd’s pie but don’t have any leftover mashed potatoes, and don’t want to go through the trouble of making mashed potatoes just for shepherd’s pie? (After all, isn’t the whole purpose of shepherd pie to use up leftovers, or at least to be able to easily throw something together without having to, you know, cut, boil, and mash potatoes?) Well our “inside-out” vegan shepherd’s pie is just what you need, and it’s naturally gluten-free too!

Our copycat recipe for the Blue Moose Vegan Queso Blanco Cashew dip will make you especially happy if you have been looking for the Blue Moose cashew queso at Costco (try saying “cashew queso at Costco” three times fast!) and been unable to find it. This is majorly a vegan Costco recipe, as it’s not only a copycat of the Blue Moose cashew queso (a Vegan Costco group favorite) but one of the best places to get organic “raw” cashews is Costco!

This copycat vegan Boursin recipe is as awesome for snacking on as it is for entertaining! And it’s so easy to whip up a batch! Vegan Boursin™️ recently became available at Costco, and it really took the vegan community by storm. But lots of locations still aren’t carrying the vegan Boursin, and so that’s when we stepped in to create this vegan Boursin copycat! This is truly a “vegan Costco recipe”, meaning that at least some of the primary ingredients can be purchased at Costco, as it uses both unroasted “raw” cashews (which we get from Costco), and the juice from sauerkraut (ditto).