Let's be honest — thinking of vegan cheese substitutes leaves something to be desired. Maybe you've taken a peek at the vegan cheese options in the grocery stores or even dabbled in coaxing a couple hunks of almond cheese to melt atop slices of bread under the broiler. In my experience, that stuff does not melt and will leave your cheese dreams hopelessly shattered.

So when coming up with a creamy vegan queso recipe, I wanted to make sure it was as good as the real thing! No shattered dreams here. We're dreaming big with veggies, cashews, and a ton of spices — and it's paying off by the chip-ful.

My husband came into the kitchen while I was prepping the veggies for the queso dip. He asked me what I was making, and when I said, "Um, I'm making queso," he gave me a quizzical glance and looked very skeptically at the piles of carrots and butternut squash I was chopping. "Where's the cheese?" he asked. I broke the news that there would be no cheese in this queso. Eventually he gave up on trying to understand my cheese-less antics, and left the kitchen.

As I cooked the veggies with plenty of spices, I heard his voice yelling from the living room, "Oh, gosh. That smells really good!" So I knew I was on the right track. The softened vegetables went into my Vitamix with green chiles, salsa, cashews, almond milk, and a bunch of nutritional yeast to give it that cheesy flavor. The results were mind-blowing. I dipped a spoon in the finished product, tasted it, and smirked a little bit, knowing that this dip could fool any cheese-lover.

I made up a party platter of vegan queso and chips, and called my husband in to the living room to help me "taste test." After the first bite, we both descended on the dip like a couple of famished hyenas — occasionally stopping to tell each other, with full mouths, how much this dip tasted like the real thing.