If you’re like me, you may have been accustomed to just buying most things off the shelf instead of making them at home: boxed meals, salad dressing, cookies, etc. When you’re trying to follow a vegan diet, however, this can make that routine a bit difficult or expensive, at the very least.

Sure, you can always go to one of those fancy grocery stores and buy the vegan version of whatever you want (hopefully), but the cost does add up. What if you could make something yourself that is not only less expensive but more tasty? Well, I decided to embark on this adventure myself recently, and today I am sharing with you all of my favorite recipes thus far from this year.

Spaghetti Squash

One of the first things I learned to cook this year was spaghetti squash. What I love about cooking spaghetti squash is that it is so easy to prepare and is quite versatile. I’ve seen several different recipes online for dishes that include it. The mild flavor of this squash lends itself to all kinds of uses. You could use it as a pasta alternative, a cold salad toss-in, or a dish of its own right.

How I like to bake it, however, is simply by cutting it in half and drizzling some olive oil and pepper on the meat side. Then, I flip both halves upside down so that the meat side faces downwards. I cook them in the oven for approximately 50 minutes at 400°F.

When cooking this squash yourself, you may want to experiment with the cooking time and temperature to get the exact consistency of your preference. You can cook it to more of an al dente texture or something softer. Either way, it’s just really good and really easy to prepare. The hardest part is just cutting it in half, and that can be made easier by simply cooking the squash whole (after poking it with a fork all over) for 10 minutes to soften it up before cutting.

Want a good starter recipe? Check this one out from Love & Lemons.

Pumpkin Drop Biscuits

Using this specific recipe from The Rocks & Dirt Bakery, I made vegan biscuits for the very first time!

Now I’ve made two variations of this recipe. The first attempt was pretty straightforward, following the recipe exactly. The biscuits turned out great, nice and moist in the middle and firmer on the edges. The only mistake I made was using coarse sea salt instead of regular ground sea salt. The issue with that was that the salt was entirely too big of a chunk, and so there were large chunks of sea salt in random places in the dough. So every now and then when you’re eating them, you’d get a nice salty surprise!

Finding the first batch entirely too salty, I overcompensated on the second attempt, haha.

I started by switching out the coarse sea salt for regular table salt—but then I used far less than what was called for. Then somehow in the mixing process, the consistency became too dry, and so I had to add more milk. I accidentally added too much almond milk and made the dough too soft. I decided just to roll with it as a fun experiment. Thankfully, the biscuits still came out delicious but far softer, less biscuit-like, and not as much flavor. Still good though! When it comes to bread, I really can’t complain.

What I really like about this recipe, both versions included, is that the inclusion of the pumpkin puree really makes for a nice, moist center. Mmmm…

Vegan Ranch Dressing

I never knew making homemade salad dressing could be so easy. Thanks to this recipe from Karissa’s Vegan Kitchen, I will never have to buy those expensive vegan salad dressings from the grocery store again!

This is the easiest thing I have tried thus far. All you have to do is mix all of the ingredients together in a bowl and chill the mixture for 2 hours. That’s it.

After your mixture has had time to chill, I recommend that you move it to a more convenient container like a bottle or glass jar. We like to recycle plastic bottles from the Huel protein shakes that we purchase, so we opted for one of those, and they turned out to be the perfect size for accommodating the portion given in the recipe.

Not only is this dressing good for salads, but other things as well. Basically whatever you could think might go good with ranch, will probably be good with this also.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

Next on our list is the vegan chocolate chip cookies recipe by Ashley Manila, Baker by Nature.

These cookies have been a big hit with everyone I’ve shared them with. Not only are they good, but they’re better than the average non-vegan chocolate chip cookie. They’re so good that after I brought a small sample to share with one of my coworkers one day, I had to return the next day with many more as people were itching to try them. I’ve literally been told that these are “the best chocolate chip cookie I have ever had.” Wow, that’s some high praise!

When I made these cookies, the only changes I made were substituting Mexican vanilla for regular vanilla and using the smaller chocolate chip morsels instead of the regular-sized ones. I really don’t think that would make much of a difference, but that’s what I did.

I also made them much bigger than called for (3 tbsp!) which got them into the Crumbl cookie-sized category.

If you find these cookies to be too sweet, you can experiment with reducing the brown sugar down to 1 cup and increasing the salt by ½ teaspoon. We did this ourselves, and we found that the mixture became too dry without the added moisture from the brown sugar. To correct this, we simply added small amounts of coconut milk until the mixture resembled the desirable dough texture and baked them at the same temperature and time. The cookies came out great this way as well, just less sweet and resembling more of a breakfast biscuit…almost like a scone.

If you’re in the mood for some delicious chocolate chip cookies, give this recipe a try. Seriously, you will not be disappointed.

So there you have it, four excellent vegan recipes to try that take little effort. Got a recipe that you’d like to recommend? Let us know in a comment below!