Pizza Pie

Canadian Thanksgiving is this weekend. We always have a bunch of people over for dinner so I get to cook for 2 days to prepare for it. I love it. Everyone's favorite pie is the Sm'love pie from Veganomicon. The first time I made it James made fun of me for wanting to make a chocolate pie instead pumpkin at Thanksgiving. And then he tasted it. Now that pie is explicitly requested for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. We have to have it when there are other people to help eat it because it's way too rich for just the two of us to finish.

Please ignore my dirty oven. A clove of garlic exploded in it when I was roasting garlic last weekend.

While the pie is baking, I'm eating leftover pizza from Vegan Pizza House. Thank goodness for leftovers! It's been a busy day of working and planning and grocery shopping. I definitely didn't want to have to add making dinner on to that . Tonight's goal was to get the base of the pie done and then I can sit back with glass of wine and watch Fringe. I'm going to be on my feet in the hot kitchen for the next 2 days straight so I need to get my relaxing in tonight while I still can!

The browned bits are all me. I reheated this in the oven to make it crispy and gooey again.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to get up and be at the farmers market by 9am to get the rest of the stuff for the feast. The market is just about a block from my apartment so I can sort of just roll out of bed and walk over there at least. I can't wait to see kinds of goodies they have. I got some local cranberries last week! 

The Pizza Box Cat Bed

This is what my cat, Piper, does when we bring home vegan pizza from Rebellious Tomato. I think she just likes that the box is super warm. Clearly that means we brought it home as a new bed for her.

So cute, isn't she? She slept on this box for hours. Even after I moved her to get some more pieces of pizza out of the box, she got right back up there. Hilarious.

I've been super busy with a bunch of stuff lately, so I promise a real post soon. Plus - I'm going to do a few giveaways to get rid of some cookbooks I never use. Sweet!

Rebellious Tomato

This is the first time I've sat down for almost the entire day. I've been cooking since around 7am for the Thanksgiving feast tomorrow. Seeing as how it's nearly 10pm now, that's a long day of cooking and standing in a hot kitchen. The last thing I wanted to do tonight was cook dinner for myself. Don't get me wrong, I love cooking, but I'm cooking for tomorrow... I had forgotten to keep something ready to eat tonight.

Enter Rebellious Tomato. This is a local Vancouver pizza joint that just so happens to have vegan pizza. (There's one in North Vancouver and one in Kitsilano if you're in the area.) I usually go in and pick it up or I just eat inside and honestly I didn't even think they delivered. But lucky for me, they do. So in the midst of the flour flying and the stuffing trying to jump out of the bowl and onto the floor, I didn't even have to cook and I still got dinner.

They use this interesting kind of cheese called Daiya. Granted, you have to specifically request it because they do have regular cheese, but still! I'm not much for fast food, but in situations like tonight, this is exactly what a vegan needs. And you can get spelt crust if you want to make it gluten free as well. Even better, there are tons of really fun toppings you can get like capers, sun-dried tomatoes, artichoke hearts, different kinds of mushrooms, etc. My personal favorite is the Riviera (sun-dried tomatoes, capers, tomatoes, green olives and artichoke hearts).

As happy as I am to have gotten sustenance, I have to giggle at how silly it is to order food when I've been doing nothing but making food all day...

Seattle Yummies

I love Seattle. I wish that I went to visit my friends down there more often. Somehow the weather is always perfect and the day just flows so nicely. For the middle of September, the high 60s/low 70s of the day was purely fantastic. There was a nice breeze from time to time, cooling things off a bit and adding a bit of a feeling of fall in the air.

I had lunch at Pizza Pi with 4 friends, one of which is one of the very few vegetarians that I know. We had fun rearranging the letter magnets on the wall to spell out ridiculous phrases while we waited for our food. The food came rather quickly, even though we all ordered something different.

Everyone either had a calzone, except Roman who had a pizza. I really enjoyed my calzone filled with faux Canadian bacon, tomatoes, mushrooms, green olives and black olives. Roman's pizza had veggie pepperoni (which he ordered using finger quotes when he asked for the pepperoni, much to my amusement), green peppers and jalapenos. I forget what everyone else had, but we all pretty much cleaned our plates. I had never had vegan pizza out before, so this was really rather exciting for me.

After lunch we were wanting to sit and have some tea and maybe something sweet so we headed over to Might-O Donuts. I was thrilled because I had wanted to go there anyway, even if it was just to grab an assortment of donuts to go.

The day being so beautiful, we sat at a table out on the sidewalk and enjoyed petting the dogs walking by and shoving the yummy, sugary goodness in our mouths. They were pretty much cleaned out except for a few flavors when we got there. There were a bunch cooling in the back that were too hot to put out yet, but we got to watch them make some cute little chocolate mini donuts.

We ordered a good ol' glazed, mini cinnamon sugar, mini pumpkin, chocolate glazed cake, and a strawberry shortcake. I was going to get some more to take with me for later, but at the last minute I decided not to because I really wanted some flavors that we hadn't already had and they were still being made or cooling. Next trip I'll be sure to get some to bring back to Vancouver.

This isn't food, but I just had to include a picture of my friend's dog, Squid. He was so worn out after a full day of playing and then a walk around Green Lake. He wanted to play more, but he didn't even have enough energy to get up at this point.

Evil Dead Pizzas

Okay, so pizza isn't really evil. Well, not my pizza, anyway. Last night I had a few friends over for horror movies and vegan yummies. It was rather fun to be having pizza and beer and still being all awesome and vegan.

I'm not one to use soy cheese normally. Once I went vegan, I just started to make food differently and I don't even miss cheese. Whenever I have bought some, I have to try and figure out what exactly to do with it. I've started to buy soy cheese slices whenever I want to make McVegans, but that's pretty much it. Because I wasn't really sure what kind would be best on pizza, I bought two different soy mozzarellas and put one on each pizza. I forgot to take pictures of the pizza before we started eating, unfortunately.

I made pizza crust and pizza sauce from Vegan with a Vengeance. The only thing I tweaked was to use whole wheat pastry flour instead of plain white flour in the pizza crust. The two cheeses I used were Vegan Rella and Vegan Gourmet. I think Vegan Gourmet is the Canadian version of Follow Your Heart cheese. It said so proudly on the package "It Melts!", but that little exclamation point wasn't enough to make it actually melt as you can see.

The Vegan Rella ended up melting too much. It was dripping all over our hands and plate. And I was told "I can't get it off my teeth." I didn't care for the flavor of this one as much as the other either. I didn't really mind the not melting so much. It didn't take away from the taste at all.

The first pizza had the VWAV sauce, Vegan Rella, Yves veggie pepperonis and roasted red pepper. The second pizza had VWAV sauce, VWAV pesto, a layer of Vegan Gourmet cheese, sauteed portabello mushrooms, roasted red pepper and tomatoes. Adding the layer of pesto with the sauce was such a great idea. The second pizza was the best of the two, hands down.

I've had a few people ask how to roast red peppers, so I'm adding the instructions for that. It's so easy and well worth it. Red peppers are awesome on so many things. You can put them on sandwiches, pasta, salads, pizza...

Roasted Red Peppers

First you want to cut the peppers. I usually cut them in half and then cut the halves into thirds. Make sure to knock out the seeds and cut out the white parts. It's easiest to get the white parts out after you've cut the pepper. Do it like this:

Put about 2 teaspoons olive oil into a bowl and add the pepper pieces. Toss them around until they've all been coated. Not like hot oil wrestling, just a little bit. Place the peppers on a cookie sheet skin side up. The broiler in my current apartment doesn't work, but if yours does you can turn on the broiler. Otherwise, heat your oven to 550. Make sure to place one of the oven racks as high up as you can if you're using the broiler. Once your oven has preheated, put the cookie sheet of peppers on that top rack if you're broiling, or in the middle if your oven is lame like mine. You want to cook the peppers until the skins start to char a little. I think I left mine in for about 15 minutes. You want them to look something like this:

After you take the peppers out of the oven, let them cool for a few minutes and then put them in a bowl or a colander and rinse them with very cold water. This stops the cooking and helps to separate the skins so you can pull them off. Don't worry, they really do peel away quite easily.

Yum! Now you can refrigerate these until you're ready to use them.

Coming soon - Vegan Rice Crispy treats and Hot Monkey Pile.