Thursday, September 19; Vegan Mofo Day 19

PIZZA!

Rating: 4.5 

Seth got some banana peppers from a coworker and I wasn’t really sure what to do with them. Since we like them on pizzas, I decided to make one of those. There’s nothing better than a homemade crust, and I went with the one in The Mediterranean Vegan Kitchen, but there are tons of great ones out there. I mixed half & half white flour with whole wheat pastry flour, in an attempt to make it a little healthier. It makes the crust a little bit firmer than all white flour, but it’s still really good. While the dough was rising, I made the sauce. We like the Vegan Zombie tomato sauce recipe (we call it Zombie Sauce). 

Now, It takes a lot of tomatoes to make sauce, which means a lot of chopping, seeding and straining, so I was at it for a little while. But, once it’s all chopped up, into the pot it goes and you can forget about it for a while. The recipe says to simmer for 20 minutes once it comes to a boil, but I grew up in an Italian neighborhood and that is nowhere near enough time. All of my friends’ Italian grandmothers would slap me for only giving it about an hour, but that was all the time I had. This recipe makes a pretty chunky sauce, so I like to zap it with the immersion blender for a few seconds to puree it a bit and smooth it out for using on pizza. 

We have a “build your own” policy with pizza, each of us making our half of the pie just how we like it. Except when it comes to putting sauce on. I’m in charge of that. The last time Seth put his own sauce on, something really bad happened. (pic) The sauce ran off the side onto the wooden peel and glued the pizza to it. After scraping the pizza off the peel, we ended up with calzones. Well, I had a calzone, Seth had a blob. It looked like it rolled downhill and picked up toppings as it went. Anyway, since the blob incident, I am now the official sauce putter-onner. I know he likes a ton of sauce and I like a little, so it’s pretty easy to tell whose side is whose. Also? I like a lot of cheese (Daiya) on mine, he just likes a little. In addition to the sauce and cheese e topped the pizza with sliced tomato, red onion, garlic, spinach, the banana peppers that started it all, fresh basil and kalamata olives. Just your basic vegan pizza pie. We had a side salad with it, because you can’t have pizza without having a salad, too.