— Cecilia Litvak

So, um, you know, Dr. Essel, uh, is okay with nuts, but if you have cardiovascular disease and heavier level, he usually tries to stay away from them. So if, uh, depending on what you are doing, um, tofu can be a great substitute for cashews, especially in sauces like silk and tofu is actually a, a wonderful thing to be able to use for, uh, sauces or dressings, um, where you can blend it up. Um, you know, if you're gonna blend that up with say, some herbs and some vinegar and maybe a touch of Dijon, you can make a nice, like Caesar dressing or even a ranch dressing, I've paid for my kids, uh, to be able to get them a healthier style ranch that their friends, you know, if they really like rich, we can do a tofu version instead too. Um, but, uh, you know, for other things like say like the ricotta, you know, like that you can do, a lot of people do a cashew ricotta. I like to do a tofu ricotta instead where I just basically crumble the tofu and then I'll put a mixture of like lemon juice and nutritional yeast and, um, some salt into it. Uh, a little bit of onion and garlic powder as well too, to be able to kinda bring out the flavors of those. And you can blend that if you want to. I usually like to break it up so it's a little more coarse, uh, you know, the texture's a little more full, but yeah, so depending on the recipe, you can absolutely, um, you know, substitute out with tofu. Um, soybeans can be the same thing. If you're using like a food processor, you can grind them up a little bit too. But depending on the recipe you are trying to replace the cashews in, um, you know, we will see if that fits or not. Some of the problem areas I might see are like a, a cashew cheese, you know, so, um, there's one that we do with an agar agar, um, you know, that would be a little hard to do without the cashew because you want the fat content to be able to do that. So it might take a little bit of experimentation to be able to get what you're looking for, just depending on the recipe.