Munchie Monday: Whole Food Nacho Sauce

We are always looking for substitutes for our formerly dairy-heavy eating.  Jill Dalton at Whole Food Plant Based Cooking Show has made a winner, in my opinion. Dear One was agitating for lunch even though it was only around 1:30 PM, so I said fine.  I knew we had some leftover chili in the refrigerator so...I made this sauce and baked some corn tortillas to go along with the chili, which I also doctored up a bit and boiled the heck out of in case it had been waiting too long to be eaten...

Whole Food Nacho Sauce

1 cup raw cashews
A handful of raisins, probably about 3 Tablespoons
1 teaspoon smoked paprika
1 Tablespoon dried onions, probably a little less than that, actually
2-3 Tablespoons nutritional yeast
2 teaspoons Braggs Liquid Aminos
2 Tablespoons white wine vinegar
1 cup water

Blend all these ingredients for at least one minute, until completely creamy.  It is supposed to be nacho cheese sauce.  All the vegans say nutritional yeast makes things taste cheese-y.  It does not.  Do not believe it. You will feel much better about using nutritional yeast for a cheese substitute when you knock your expectations down to the ground.  "Nooch" has its own taste which sometimes adds to the flavor of a dish and sometimes not.  In this case, the combination of ingredients, at least the way I put them together, is just delicious.  I think this sauce could go on just about anything...well, maybe not cake, but who eats cake, anyway?

To make the tortilla chips that went with the sauce, I pre-heated the oven to 400 degrees F then put half a dozen corn tortillas right on the rack and cooked them for 5 minutes, checked them, then cooked another 2 minutes.  They could probably have cooked another minute or two but I did not want them to burn.  By the time I had broken them up and gotten them to the table, they were crispy so the extra oven time was unnecessary.