Vegan Pizza

Generally I am not a fan of "imitation" food - fake meats, cheese etc. (I suppose the exception to this is almond milk, which I use in oatmeal and sometimes smoothies). However, yesterday we just really wanted a pizza and movie night.

Since we have no TV, I bought a used single white sheet - which I bleached and dried; and two 9-ft dowels from the hardware store. Two quick hems with ends open on the long sides of the sheet and we had ourselves a projector screen (we have a projector - just had never figured out the screen part). I attached two small hooks to the wall of our bedroom and up went the screen. Felt over some scrap wood from the hardware store made for our projector stand and the movie theatre was ready!!

home-made movie screen ( before the wrinkes were straightened out)

For the pizza, I took a simple wheat and yeast pizza dough recipe (will attempt gluten-free at some point, but wasn't up to it yesterday), kneaded it and let it rise while assembling the screen, as described above.


I had originally planned on buying pesto, but shock! to my disappointment, ALL the available prepared pesto was full of Parmesan cheese. (who knew?!?). I don't quite have enough basil on my plants right now to have made enough pesto to cover a pizza, so I decided to go with red pizza sauce.

Our Vegan Pizza

Because I was having a crazy busy day, I bought some organic canned pizza sauce (though usually I make it with tomatoes, tomato paste,  garlic, finely diced or blended onion, minimal salt, basil and/or herbs de province and tons or oregano. Really nice in a crock pot on low for the day or on the stove top simmering for an hour or two Garlic and oregano are the keys for me!).

Then my husband and I picked our ingredients for toppings:

• thinly sliced tomatoes
• thinly sliced onion
• thinly sliced garlic
• vegan sausage
• chopped fresh basil

Now, I'm not a huge pizza fan - I just get a craving every now and again. But, the cheese for me is half the point of the pizza.  We tried, a month or two ago, a local pizza place that offers a vegan option and while it was not bad, we didn't love the taste or consistency of the cheese.  Having not tried any fake cheese products up to this point, I had to just take a gamble at the store and choose one of the many options (ahhh, Portland).

We LOVED the cheese we ended up with. It actually tasted quite a lot like mozzarella (pre-vegan days, we would buy mozzarella balls and chop them up to make pizza topping). The cheese we used was made by Lisanatti Food. It was an almond based cheese that was both dairy and soy free!  It even melted a little bit and tasted great!

What a GREAT pizza and movie night!