I made pizza dough tonight from scratch and I pronounce it to be a semi-success.  It would have been a total successful had I not skipped one very important step, but I’ll get to that in a minute.  Even having skipped this important step, it still turned out really good.  In fact, it tasted pretty much exactly like regular pizza dough– actually, I think I might like this recipe even better than wheat dough.  Since this was my first time, I relied on this recipe here.  I wasn’t able to find all the ingredients and, of course, had to swap some stuff to make it vegan, so here’s my adaptation of that recipe.

Gluten-Free Vegan Pizza Dough
adapted from this recipe

Step 1

Place pizza stone in oven at 170 degrees.

Step 2

Ingredients:

2 1/2 TB olive oil
1/2 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 TB agave or maple syrup

Combine in a small bowl and set aside.

Step 3

Ingredients:

1/4 cup amaranth flour
3/4 cup white rice flour
1/4 cup sweet rice flour (you can find this at Asian markets)
3/4 cup tapioca starch
2 TB quinoa flour
2 tsp xantham gum
3/4 tsp salt
1 1/2 TB sugar

Combine all of the above ingredients in the bowl of your stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment.

Step 4

Ingredients:

3/4 cup warm water
1 tsp sugar
2 1/2 tsp active dry yeast

Warm water to 115-120 degrees (this feels warmish-hot to the touch in case you don’t have an instant thermometer). In a small bowl, combine 1/4 cup of the warm water with the sugar and yeast. Set aside for a few minutes to allow the yeast to proof.

Step 5

Ingredients:

3 tsp Ener-G egg replacer (equivalent to 2 eggs)
1/4 cup water (omit if you use eggs)

Whisk the Ener-G powder with the water and add to the bowl of dry ingredients along with the yeast and olive oil, vinegar and agave mixture. Turn on the mixer and slowly add the remaining 1/2 cup warm water (from step 4). Add more warm water as necessary until the dough looks like cake frosting (to get to this consistency, I used about 1 1/2 cups total).

It should look like this:

Step 6

Remove pizza stone from oven and turn the oven off. Place a sheet of parchment paper on top of the warm pizza stone and brush lightly with olive oil. Put the dough on top of the oiled parchment paper and spread into a 12″ or 13″ circle. I found that my hands worked best for this step (I put some olive oil on them first). Place pizza stone back into the warm oven and let the dough rise for 40 minutes.

Step 7

After the dough has risen for 40 minutes, turn the oven on to 350 degrees and pre-bake your crust for 10 minutes. This was the step I missed in the instructions and even though mine turned out okay, I wouldn’t recommend skipping this step.

Step 8

After 10 minutes, remove pizza crust from oven and add your toppings. Increase the oven temperature to 425 degrees and once you’ve got what you want on top of your pizza, put back into the oven and bake until the crust is golden and cheese is bubbly. My tips for making the perfect vegan pizza can be found here, but one tip that I will reiterate here is that you really need to bake the cheese (I used a combo of Daiya mozz and cheddar) before adding any vegetables or other watery ingredients. Once the veggies start cooking, they make the cheese too watery and it gets a little gross. This time, I topped my pizza with jarred marinara, the Daiya, mushrooms, zucchini, spinach and jalapenos.

The verdict: Yes, it was labor intensive, but so worth it. This is better than any GF pizza crust you can get in the store. I think what I might do is on days when I have free time (uh… what’s that?!) is make a batch and pre-bake, then freeze for use later. Or if I knew that I was planning pizza for dinner that week, I might make this one or two days ahead to save some time. So, there are ways to do it so that it doesn’t take so long to make. If you’re GF, or even if you aren’t and want to try something new, give this recipe a try.

As a member of Farm Sanctuary, I often get emails from them advertising their latest campaign or fundraiser. (Click here to read about our summer road trip to their CA farm where we got to see some of the turkeys rescued from slaughter.) I don’t always post their campaign information here, but thought this one was appropriate for Thanksgiving. More than 46 million turkeys were slaughtered this year for Thanksgiving alone and I’m happy to say that none were a part of my Thanksgiving day celebration.

Our cruelty-free meal started with homemade pizza and salad and ended with homemade caramel apple pie with praline ice cream.



The pizza was delicious. I ended up making one pepperoni and olive, one veggie no eggplant, and one that was half plain cheese and half veggie with eggplant. I mentioned in a previous post that I am in love with eggplant and eat it all the time, but Matt doesn’t share the same appreciation. Seriously, I bought 3 eggplants this week and have already eaten 2 of them. You can check out this post for my tips on making vegan pizzas.



The pie is one that I’ve made before, but the last time I made it I thought it was too sweet. I had also added vanilla, as some of the comments suggested to, and I didn’t like that either. So this time, I used all Granny Smith apples and made only half a recipe of the caramel sauce to pour on top. I also only had one crust in the freezer, so mine doesn’t have a top crust. This time it turned out perfect! I loved it. Funny thing– Emma was the one who begged me to make apple pie for dessert and she ended up not liking it. She loved the pizza and ice cream, though!

What did you do for Thanksgiving? I’d love to read all about it.

Emma earned enough stickers on her reward chart to see Toy Story 3 yesterday. When we were walking from the parking garage to the theater, we passed by a pizza place and the smell was heavenly! Matt kept trying to tempt me with the most non-vegan pizzas he could think of– pepperoni, Hawaiian– but now it’s a mental thing. I don’t think I could ever go back to eating meat again. He’s vegetarian, by the way, so it’s not like he would have eaten those pizzas either. He just doesn’t think my vegan pizzas at home are the same as pizza parlor non-vegan pizzas.

So last night after the movie, I was making my menu and shopping list for the week and couldn’t resist trying to prove him wrong. My vegan pizzas are delicious and taste just like their non-vegan counterparts. At least I think they do, but it has been about 9 years since I’ve had real meat– even longer for him. Tonight was our pizza night and I ended up making 4 different kinds:

Plain cheese (for the kid).

Hawaiian – topped with Yves brand vegan Canadian bacon and pineapple.

Veggie – topped with broccoli, black olive and red onion.

Pepperoni (Yves brand) and black olive.

I made the dough from scratch in my bread machine, using the recipe that came in the booklet that accompanied it.  The only change I made was to double the recipe (since it’s not baking in the machine, I figured it would be okay to do that) and I didn’t pre-bake the crust, as the recipe instructs.  All of the pizzas are topped with a jarred marinara sauce and a mix of cheddar and mozzarella Daiya vegan cheese.  All were delicious, but my favorite was the pepperoni and black olive.  Matt preferred the veggie and commented that the faux meats just aren’t the same as the real thing.  He’s wrong, by the way. 

Since there’s no real recipe to this, I’ve made a list of pizza tips I’ve learned along the way:

• Vegan cheese is not like dairy cheese.  When topping your pizza, go easy on the cheese.  It will spread out while baking and the less you have, the better.  To give you an example, I didn’t even use half the bag of cheddar Daiya and I only used about 3/4 of the bag of the mozzarella for all 4 pizzas. Also, if you’re using Daiya that has been frozen, you’ll want to let it thaw first.
• If you’re topping your pizza with anything watery– vegetables, pineapple, etc– put the veggies on before topping with the cheese.  The water from the vegetables will mix with the cheese and make it too runny and weird.  You may notice some of the weirdness in the photo above of the Hawaiian pizza since I put the pineapple on top of the cheese.  It just works better to put the watery stuff underneath the cheese.
• With Daiya, you can bake your pizza at around 400 – 425 degrees and be okay.  With any other kind of vegan cheese (the FYH brand, for example), you’ll need to bake your pizza at a much higher temperature to get the cheese to melt.
• Once you remove your pizza from the oven, let it sit for a few minutes for the cheese to solidify a bit.  Otherwise, a lot of it will slide off when cut into it.

That’s all the tips I can think of.  Anyone else have any to add?

My munchkin requested pizza for dinner last night. Since I hadn’t planned on making anything in particular, I thought it would be an easy enough request to fill, even though I had no pizza sauce or dough on hand. I whipped out my trusty bread machine and made the dough for the crust, using the recipe in the book that came with the bread maker. That recipe said that I should prebake the crust, which I did, but will definitely never do again. Baking it twice was just too long and made for one tough crust.

Since I had no pizza sauce, Emma had hers plain topped with some Daiya mozzerella from the freezer (I let it thaw before using).  Essentially she had cheese and bread for dinner, but she loved it.  She also had ate some salad and a plum, so that sort of made up for the pizza.  For the adult pizza, I used some vegan pesto that I had in the freezer as the sauce.  This particular one I got from a stand at the farmer’s market, but you could make your own or use whatever sauce you want.  I then topped the pizza with some very lightly sauteed zucchini, red onion and broccoli.  Had I not prebaked the crust, I wouldn’t have sauteed it but I thought it best to soften them a tad before putting in the oven since it all would have finished baking at different times.  On top of the veggies, I added the Daiya.  Bake at 400 degrees for about 8-10 minutes, or until the cheese is melty.

I don’t know what inspired this meal, but I have an idea it may have had something to do with this post about a turkey and cheddar biscuit.  I follow lots of bento blogs and while pretty much none of them ever make anything vegan, they can inspire food creativity and some things can easily be veganized.  I must have had the idea of a turkey and cheddar biscuit in my head all day because by the time dinner rolled around, it was all I could think about.  I had a pack of smoked tofurky in the fridge, but no vegan cheddar style cheese.  In the freezer, though, I had some Daiya mozzarella and I thought– tofurky pizza!  Pizza, on a biscuit?  It sounds like a recipe the Duggars may have invented, I know.  If you’ve ever watched their show, you know that they come up with some pretty…  uhhmm… creative?… culinary delights.

The idea didn’t sound so bad, so I took myself to Google to find a vegan (or veganizable) rolled biscuit recipe, since I typically only make drop biscuits when I make them from scratch.  I’m not sure of any brands of store bought biscuits that are vegan, although I’m sure some exist even if they are just “accidentally vegan.”  Beware of funky ingredients like hydrogenated oils and stuff, if you are as turned off by them as I am.  If you can’t find any and don’t want to make your own, I bet you could attempt this pizza idea (or even the turkey/cheddar thing) with crescent rolls.

Anyway, I settled on this recipe and I used Earth Balance shortening for the fat.  I have no preference for shortening over margarine in recipes like these, but the shortening is a wee bit cheaper and a little less versatile than the marg.  I thought I’d save my marg for another day.  So I made the biscuit dough, rolled out to about 1/2″ thickness, used a glass to cut them out, then rolled the biscuits to about 1/4″ thickness.  I topped each with some jarred marinara that I had leftover from our pasta dish the other night– I had cooked up some red lentils and pureed them into the sauce, which was really tasty!  Anyway, then I sliced up some tofurky and put the Daiya on top of that.  When working with vegan cheese, I find it best to put it on top of everything since vegan cheese doesn’t melt the same way dairy cheese does.  And if you’re topping your pizzas with veggies, the water from the veggies will really keep your cheese from melting and may even make it too watery.  That’s just been my experience.

These baked for about 10 minutes and turned out really good.  I’m still craving the turkey/cheddar biscuits, so I may have to make those next week when I can get myself to the store to score some Daiya cheddar.  Emma helped me make these and had fun playing with the leftover dough (hey, it’s way better than playdoh!  Does anyone else gag at the smell of playdoh?).  And, she ended up eating 3 of these pizzas– the recipe yielded 8 biscuits, 4 of which were tofurky and 4 of which were plain cheese.  Even with making biscuits from scratch, this was ready to be eaten in about 20 minutes.  Can’t beat that!

(And sorry for the crappy photo.  I broke our camera and am now relying on my iPhone.  It was my fault and I take full responsibility for the broken camera.  It fell out of the unzipped camera case as I was carrying it and the screen cracked.  Just my luck!)

I haven’t had the motivation to cook lately.  Just one of those funks.  But I feel really bad every night when dinner time rolls around and (1) there’s nothing ready to eat or (2) it’s something easy and lazy.  Last week I decided that I would make a new dish every night from recipes on blogs that I enjoy reading even if some haven’t been updated in a reeaaallly long time (ahem!!!).  It didn’t really work out as I had planned it, but I did manage to make a fair amount of dishes that I’ve never made before.

6 Layer Bean Dip from Disposable Aardvarks Inc.

Dippers were hemp and veggie tortilla chips with flax seeds (hey, you gotta get in those Omega-3s!), and some veggie crudite.  This was good, but I put on way too much sour cream.  I think we all would have liked it better if I’d not been so heavy handed with the sour cream, especially since it has the same consistency of the beans and it was pretty impossible to scrape off.

While on the topic of sour creams, I tried a new brand that I’m not sure I’ve blogged about before:  Vegan Gourmet Sour Cream Alternative.  It was good and I would use it again, but I think I still prefer Tofutti.

Next up are Mini Samosa Wraps from The Veggie Guy.

I left out the crushed red pepper.  Even with that, these still had a little kick to them (good for me because I like spicy).  Emma even tried a few bites and, while she wasn’t wild about them, she didn’t spit it out.  These were good, but it was too much of the same texture for me.  Mushy potato inside and soft tortilla outside.  I was really missing the deep-fried crispy texture of a traditional samosa.  Flavor-wise, these were spot on.

Sloppy Joses over Polenta from One Frugal Foodie.

The original recipe calls for ground turkey, so I substituted a vegan ground “beef.”  Also, I couldn’t find polenta in a tube for some reason, so I had to make my own and it actually turned out really good.  To make the polenta, I used 2 cups of veggie stock and 2 cups of plain, unsweetened soy milk and 1 cup of polenta.  Yum!

This recipe was really tasty (and made excellent taco filling for a leftover night), but my hubby had the brilliant idea of just using corn bread in place of the polenta next time.  So much easier and a better texture.

Chili from Vegannifer.

I didn’t follow the recipe exactly, but I think it still turned out pretty close to the original.  Changes I made to the original recipe:

1. I omitted the cubanelle pepper and tomato.  I just used 1 onion and 2 green bell peppers and added some chopped celery because I had some that needed eating.
2. In place of water, I used veg stock.
3. In place of pineapple juice, I used a tropical carrot juice.
4. I don’t know what Vegebase is and I didn’t have any, so I didn’t use it.
5. I didn’t have red beans, but substituted one 15 oz. can of black beans and one 15 oz. can of garbanzo beans.
6. I omitted the rice.
7. I didn’t have cilantro flakes or chipotle powder and omitted those as well.
8. I had leftover Sloppy Joses and threw that in the pot too (just the beefy part, not the polenta).

After all those substitutions and omissions, this chili recipe was pretty good.  Next time, I won’t add the seitan chicken.  It’s good with it, but we’ve been indulging a little too heavily in the fake meats lately and I feel off.  I’d rather not eat those as often as we have been.  Later this month, I think I’m due for a fast/cleanse of some sort.

Spicy Jalapeno Pizza from Tofu N Sprouts.

I prefer a veggie heavy pizza as opposed to a cheese heavy pizza.  I think this pizza is a good blend of the original recipe and my personal pizza preference.  Please do read through the original recipe as there are LOTS of great vegan pizza making tips.  One such tip: prebaking the pizza dough and then broiling the cheese.  From now on, I will prebake my dough then broil the cheese to melt it, then put the veggies on, then broil some more.  When you try to make a pizza with lots of veggies and vegan cheese, the water in the veggies makes the cheese too wet and it’s not the most pleasant thing to eat.  But, if you broil it first to melt the cheese, then add the veggies, it makes a perfect pizza.

It’s probably also worth mentioning that I just used the Pepper Jack rice cheese and jalapenos.  I didn’t add any of the other stuff to the dough… as I mentioned previously, I am lazy.

For those nights when you just don’t know what to make, don’t want to spend tons of time in the kitchen, or are just plain unmotivated, I’ve come up with a new idea– meals in minutes!   Whenever I come up with a tasty meal that can be made in about 15 minutes, I’ll file it under the “Quick & Easy” category (you can browse the recipe categories in the sidebar to the right).

I’ve had several lazy nights this week and on one of those nights, I came up with a yummy, simple pizza.  While looking through my freezer the other evening, I found some frozen pizza dough.  Then I found something even better– some frozen flatbread!   It worked perfectly– no waiting for anything to defrost, and the entire meal came together in about 15 minutes.

Preheat your oven to 425 degrees.  Meanwhile, chop up all of your toppings.  I used zucchini, green onions, red and green bell peppers and kalamata olives.  While chopping your pizza toppings, chop extra to toss into a salad.  When your oven is done preheating (or when you are done chopping), put your flatbread directly on the oven rack in the middle of the oven.  Top with sauce and your chopped vegetables.  Cook for about 8 minutes or until the flatbread is crispy.

This works well with pita bread and tortillas too!

I started a Hula Hoop for Fitness class on Wednesday’s and last night was my first class.  Don’t laugh– hula hooping is probably harder than you think and my instructor said one hour can burn around 600 calories.  Besides, it’s a lot of fun!  Anyway, Matt is working late this week and I wanted to make something before my class that we could easily reheat later.  I had some whole wheat pizza dough in the freezer and decided to make a Mexican-style pizza.

In place of the sauce, I used salsa.  Cheese was FYH mozarella (just a little bit).  Toppings were black beans, red onion, corn, green bell peppers and chopped cilantro.  Very, very good.  I had intended to put some chopped tomatoes on top too, but forgot.  Ah well.  My crust was rolled out very, very thin, BTW.  You could use whole wheat tortillas in place of the crust.  Yes, I am incapable of creating a complex sentence today.  Very challenging day with the kiddo, but I won’t bore you with the details.

Finally, a vegan pizza in the mission kitchen!  I braved the vegan cheese (Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet) after slowing getting accustomed to it by starting with soy or rice non-vegan cheese.  The verdict:  it’s not as bad as I remember it being the first time I tried it.  In fact, it was actually good!  Some important tips to follow:

1. Use sparingly!  Don’t pile it on as they would at pizza parlors.  A little goes a long way here; when it melts together in the oven, it’ll spread out to cover the whole surface of the pizza.
2. Bake at an extremely high temperature.  I’m not kidding– bake the pizza at the highest temp your oven can reach.
3. To brown up, put under the broiler for a few minutes after baking.

I used mine on a BBQ “chicken” style pizza.  For it, I used BBQ sauce in place of the marinara, some FYH cheese (mozzarella), sliced red onions, a few cilantro leaves and some Yves Meatless Chicken Strips that I coated liberally in BBQ sauce.  I’ve never tried these chicken strips before, but found them to be very passable as chicken.  I thought they were pretty good!  Keep in mind, though, that I’ve not had real chicken in 7 years.  This pizza was awesome!

Having said that, my hubby did not care for the cheese at all.  He isn’t vegan and does have regular cheese on very rare occassions.  It could be that he is used to regular cheese… or it could be that he doesn’t really care for vegan cheese at all.  He said it is sour, almost like goat cheese.  He’s also the one who couldn’t smell the stench of the durian, so it’s up to you on who you want to believe. 

For dinner tonight, we had some calzones!  Calzones are much easier (I think) than making a whole pizza.  Ours were stuffed with some soy cheese (not vegan, but I’m going to try the vegan cheese again after I use up the rest of the package I already have), jarred marinara, some fresh spinach and grated zucchini.  I need to hit the grocery store, so these weren’t all that exciting.  The dough was very good though (store bought) and I’ve found that the trick is to brush the entire thing with a little olive oil before baking.  Makes a nice crispy outside.

Alongside, we had a spinach salad with dried cranberries, grated zucchini, grated carrots and grated beets (raw).  I find that grating the veggies on top of the salad makes it easier to eat.  Anyway, that’s just the way I like ‘em.

Time to get the kiddo in bed!