Healthy Vegan - Vegan Cincinnati Spaghetti

Usually towards the end of the working week, namely Thursday and Friday - the meals I had prepped in advance (at the weekend) to heat up after work is gone, so on these days between D and myself - we will tend to cobble something together with what we have in the fridge or store cupboards.

 I often opt to make a relatively quick pasta dish.  Its either Arrabbiata, vegan Puttanesca or Aglio, Olio e Peperonicino), but last week I decided to make a bookmarked spaghetti recipe that looked very hearty. 

Once you start making the sauce for the Cincinnati Spaghetti, you quickly note that lentils are an old fashioned way of mimicking meat for vegans and vegetarians, nothing wrong with that, its quite a humble dish in fact - elevated by some millennials favourite ingredient - avocado.
The recipe for this vegan Cincinnati Spaghetti comes from a very hefty cookbook The Superfun Times: Vegan Holiday Cookbook by Isa Chandra Moskowitz.  I thought it was a made up dish but then I did a little Internet research and its actually a real dish known as Cincinnati chilli made with spicy mincemeat and used a topping for spaghetti.  It was developed by Macedonian migrants in the 1920s.  

 It was interesting to eat and made a change.  Not like chilli and not quite like Bolognese.  The avocado topping was welcome as it was cooling next to the rich tomato sauce flavoured with spices and cocoa powder, but the original recipe comes smothered with lots of grated cheddar. 
The recipe for Cincinnati Spaghetti in the Vegan Holiday Cookbook states it serves four people, but I think you could feed up to six people which in our case we had this over two days. I am not going to reproduce the recipe here even though I did tweak it a little.  I thought I'd be able to find it on the Internet, but nope - so I have decided to link to PETA Four-Way Cincinnati Chili (2007) whose recipe is the closest to the one found in the book, except it is made with veggie burger crumbles aka soy mince instead of lentils. I am also linking this vegan Cincinnati Spaghetti to Herbivores Heaven blog as she cooked extensively from The Superfun Times: Vegan Holiday Cookbook in 2017 and you can admire her  homemade efforts. 

 I am sharing this with The VegHog who is hosting MLLA My Legume Love Affair this month as this dish contains not only has lentils, but also kidney beans.  MLLA was started by The Well Seasoned Cook and now run by the lovely Lisa of  Lisa's Kitchen. 

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