For Valentine’s Day this year, my husband, daughter and I went out for pizza and ice cream.  It was a really fun family date night.

We always get pizza from Amici’s since they are the only pizza parlor that I know of to offer vegan cheese.  It’s also within walking distance to our house.  They used to use Cheezly, but now they use Daiya.  I think I preferred the taste of Cheezly over the Daiya, but the Daiya is still good and has the added bonus of being soy free.  Some Amici’s locations even offer a gluten-free crust.

Close up of Daiya's melti-ness

We always go for the Asante pizza, which is crust, vegan cheese, spinach, onions, tomatoes and broccoli.  The nice thing about Amici’s is that you can substitute vegan cheese for dairy cheese on any of their pizzas for at additional cost.  I wish Starbucks was the same way with milk… ahem.  Seriously, Starbucks, you make oodles and oodles of money every year, yet you charge 50 cents to substitute soy milk for cows milk.  Would you really go bankrupt letting the few people who prefer soy milk to order it at no extra charge… especially when drinks cost more than $3 to begin with?  But I digress.

After dinner, we moved down the strip mall to Milkshake Werks which, despite it’s name, always offers a vegan ice cream.  Yay!  I like to think that I played a part in that.  I would occasionally stop in for ice cream only to discover that they didn’t have ANY non-dairy ice creams or sorbets.  Bummer!  I mean, dairy or lactose intolerance is pretty big these days… you’d think that they would continuously have at least one non-dairy option.  Well, in cases like this, I like to email the company or owner with my requests/recommendations, but I couldn’t find any method to contact them via email at the time (and I’m not ballsy enough to call them on the phone… LOL).  Anyway, I resorted to giving them a lame (but honest) review on Yelp, which prompted the owner to contact me, which I responded to with Vegan Dad’s Chocolate Ice Cream recipe, which they now offer all the time (and it’s super delish, by the way).  AND the best part is that I can still show my face in there and they have no idea that it was me.  Hee hee!  I have since updated my Yelp review to give them more stars and praise for their willingness to offer a vegan ice cream since many places don’t care.  They also have sugar free options.

And I know you’re all very curious… I did try this same email-writing tactic with Starbucks to get them to offer soy milk as a complimentary substitution.  It didn’t work and yet I still go there.  Shame on me.  Imagine the impact, though, if all of you do it…  won’t that be a fun experiment.  To contact Starbucks to ask them to offer soy milk for FREE, click here and fill out this form.