baked spinach and pasta with a creamy roasted garlic sauce

i started playing around the silken tofu a while ago.  it works well as an egg replacer in baked goods or egg dishes.  but it also makes a thick, creamy sauce when blended, like in my recipe for  vegan sour cream.

recently, i’ve been brainstorming ways to turn tofu into a creamy pasta sauce and the result was surprisingly simple.  it just takes a little roasted garlic, some olive oil and salt!  the rich, sweet flavor of the roasted garlic gives the sauce all the flavor it needs and this simple sauce could be used in any dish you’d like!

baked spinach and pasta with a creamy roasted garlic sauce
1 bag of pasta (any kind you’d like; 14 oz)
1 bunch of spinach
1 block of silken tofu (12 oz)
2 heads of garlic
1/4 c of oil (olive or canola work great)
1 tsp salt
flax meal (optional)
bread crumbs (optional)

first off you must bake the garlic as this takes much longer than everything else.  peal all of the cloves of the 2 heads of garlic and remove their tough bottom tip.

bake them at 400F for 30 minutes loosely wrapped in aluminum foil, they should be slightly softened, light golden in color and much sweeter and less pungent than raw garlic.

while that’s roasting you can prep everything else.  boil your pasta until soft, then strain.

wash the spinach well and remove the bottoms of the stems.  i kept cut my leaves pretty coarsely  because they will shrink a bit when baked, and i like the long stringy pieces of spinach, but you can chop them smaller if you’d like.

the last thing to prep is optional.  i like to mix even parts of flax meal and bread crumbs to sprinkle over any baked pasta dish i make.  it gives it a nice hardy crunch on top.  if you don’t want to buy them, you can make bread crumbs or flax meal at home just by pulsing stale bread or flax seeds in the blender.

once the garlic is all done roasting, throw it in a blender along with the block of tofu, oil and salt.  blend and you’ve got the simplest, tastiest, creamiest sauce that’s perfect for any pasta dish or even with cooked vegetables.

mix the pasta, spinach and garlic sauce all together in a large bowl or pan.

then spoon out portions into small dishes for individual servings, or you can put it all in a casserole dish and bake it all together.  sprinkle with the flax meal/bread crumbs before popping it in the oven at 350F for about 15 minutes, or until the top is beginning to look crunchy and baked.