These gluten-free vegan peanut butter bacon protein balls are a great vegan alternative to the protein truffles MyProtein offers. While the protein truffles MyProtein features seem to be all the rage, they are not only not vegan, but by all accounts they don’t even taste that good. On the other hand, our vegan peanut butter bacon truffles are delicious! They are also super easy to make, and the truffles (balls) themselves have only 3 ingredients, all available at Costco, or any major grocery store, or even on Amazon: peanut butter, protein powder, and peanut butter powder.

Our recipe for Not Dogs tofu dogs is our favorite vegan hot dog recipe and, it turns out, our favorite gluten-free vegan hot dogs of all. (But they are not copycat Tofu Pups, because the ingredients are much cleaner.) If you are a regular reader of the Happy Gluten-Free Vegan, you already know that we recently completed our head-to-head review of the three brands of gluten-free vegan hot dogs that are available to purchase in store or online; those are Moving Mountains, Yeah Dawg, and Sweet Earth. Of those three, Sweet Earth was the clear winner for flavor and texture, while Moving Mountains was the clear winner for clean ingredients and being intentionally vegan, and Yeah Dawg was the only one that was intentionally both gluten-free and vegan, but they failed in the flavor and texture department. You know that old saying “if you want something done right you have to do it yourself”? We wanted a gluten-free vegan hot dog that had clean ingredients, good flavor, and good texture. So we decided to create one.

Our copycat dark chocolate Chunky bars are super-easy to make, they are vegan, they are gluten-free, and honestly they are just plain better (and better for you) then actual Chunky bars (especially since Nestle took them over, and reduced the quality of the ingredients, and raised the price). Plus, you can get all of the ingredients at Costco (but of course you don’t have to), and organic (ditto)!

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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 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).

Our copycat Cocomel vegan caramels recipe (made from coconut milk) is incredibly easy to make and takes only 3 ingredients! This is our own recipe for vegan caramels, developed after we realized that all of the recipes for coconut milk caramels out there are basically copies of the Saveur recipe (right down to the word-for-word copied “combine the sugar and the water and stir until sugar is wet” instructions). And most of them use use corn syrup, and also some sort of fat (vegan butter or solid coconut oil), and … water?? WTF? Cocomels don’t have that stuff in them! The ingredients for Cocomels are organic coconut milk, organic brown rice syrup, organic dried cane syrup, sea salt, and xanthan gum. Period. The ingredients for our copycat Cocomels vegan caramels are organic coconut milk, organic brown rice syrup, and organic sugar. No xanthan gum. For this recipe we use the organic coconut milk and organic sugar from Costco (but of course you don’t have to).

What’s a party, Super Bowl or otherwise, without chips and dip? Especially that quintessential chip dip, French onion dip? If you agree, but have been at a loss as to how to make that classic French onion dip vegan and gluten-free, you’re going to love our gluten-free vegan French onion dip!

Yes, you can reconstitute the Laird Superfood creamer in advance, so that you have Laird Superfood creamer in liquid form! (Read on for how to do it!) The Laird Superfood creamer is all the rage in the Vegan Costco group, and elsewhere, and for good reason! First, the awesome and clean ingredients: coconut milk powder, coconut sugar, calcium from marine algae (their proprietary version is Aquamin, which always makes us think of Aquaman), and extra virgin coconut oil. The coconut sugar and the coconut oil are organic, to boot!

Want an easy, delicious, gluten-free vegan doughnut recipe? One that doesn’t even resort to flax eggs or the like? Whether you call them donuts or doughnuts, our gluten-free vegan cinnamon doughnut recipe is going to become your new best friend! This is also a vegan Costco recipe because it features ingredients from Costco (although of course you don’t have to get yours from Costco!)

Golden Turmeric Cups (nicknamed Golden Cups or even Golden Fat Bombs) are super-easy to make, super delicious, and super good for you! And of course they are gluten-free and vegan. Full of healthy fats, and with the MCTs from coconut oil, and protein from nut butter and protein powder, they are a great ‘pick-me-up’ snack, and perfect for quick-quenching a bit of hunger! We get all of the main ingredients (all three of them :~)) at Costco, but you can of course get them elsewhere as well.

If you are looking for a healthful and different dessert or snack (or hey, breakfast bars), look no further. Our gluten-free vegan fig bars are it! With an easy press-in bottom crust, scrumptious filling made from dried figs (Costco has a great deal on them!), and lovely crumbly topping, these vegan fig bars are as easy to make as they are delicious!

We love us some hash brown potatoes, and we particularly like the shelf-stable cartons of dried hashbrowns (the manufacturer has it as one word even though technically it’s two words) that you can get from Costco. You just open the top of the carton, pour in boiling water, and let it sit for 12 minutes: presto! Enough shredded raw hashed potatoes to feed a small army – if that army is 2-4 people. The carton says it makes seven servings, but c’mon, who do they think they’re kidding?

Whether you call it vegan shepherd’s pie, vegan cottage pie, or vegan hachis parmentier, this easy and delicious gluten-free vegan recipe will delight you! Made entirely with shelf-stable products, the majority of which we get from Costco, this is a perfect recipe to make from things you have on hand in your pantry (and so it is both a ‘quarantine recipe’ and a ‘Costco recipe’).