IC Friendly Red Pizza

1-2 pizza's worth of your favorite dough

2 roasted peeled seeded red bell peppers, puréed

1/4 C water

4-6 large cloves of garlic, chopped

Fresh basil, shredded with your hands (use dried if you prefer)

If you have access to other fresh herbs, you can also add thyme, oregano, tarragon, parsley, etc. 

1 tb olive oil

Salt to taste

(Optional, red and black pepper to taste)

1 bag of Daiya mozzarella shreds

1 can of sliced olives

(Optional, artichoke hearts packed in water, mushroom slices, seasoned wheat gluten, or any of your favorite pizza toppings)

Purée the red bell peppers in a blender, food processor, or use a stick blender. You may need to add a little olive oil to get things moving. Set aside.

Warm your olive oil in a sauce pot over a medium low flame.  When you can feel heat from the oil, add your chopped garlic and turn the heat all the way down. Let the garlic infuse the oil for ten minutes or so.  When your kitchen smells like grandma's house, turn the heat to medium and pour in the bell pepper purée. 

Add your herbs and water, and simmer (stirring occasionally) until it thickens to a pizza sauce consistency. Take off heat and salt to taste. If your sauce is bitter, you can sprinkle in some sugar. Making sure all the seeds and skin are removed cuts down on bitterness.

My favorite dough recipe, made in a bread machine:

3/4 C semolina flour

3/4 C spelt flour

1 3/4 C bread flour or AP flour

3 tb sugar

1 1/2 tsp salt

1-2 tb olive oil

1 1/4 C plain unsweetened almond milk, warm

1 envelope of yeast

Using the dough setting, add the ingredients according to the manual for your machine. I add salt and sugar first, then liquid followed by the semolina and spelt. Next comes the yeast and finally the wheat flour. I let the dough mix for a bit, then use a scraper to push down the flour and dough pieces that stick to the side. Wait until the first mixing cycle is done to decide to add more flour or almond milk. A good dough ball will be round and firm, but not sticky (too wet) or flaky (too dry). To fix a dough ball, add a tb of flour or almond milk to get it right. 

This dough is ready to bake when the bread machine is done, or you can knead and store in a zippy bag coated with olive oil for the next day. This will develop the gluten and make your dough chewy and puffy. When you roll out your dough, you may need to let it rest if the gluten gets fussy.  You'll see this if the dough keeps shrinking back to its original size.  Letting it relax in the fridge for a few minutes will make rolling it out easier.  The higher the gluten content of your flour, the puffier our crust will be.  Bread flour has a high gluten content, AP flour has less, pastry flour has low gluten content.  You may need to play with different types of flour to get the crust you like.

Top your pizza with a few tb of sauce, olives (and other veggies), a handful of cheese shreds, and bake at 450° for at least 10 minutes. Check the crust for crisping, depending on the thickness, it may take 20 minutes or so to cook through. The thicker the crust, the lower in the oven it should go. You may need to broil the top to get the cheese to melt. If your crust is golden, take the pizza out of the oven while the broiler fires up so that the bottom doesn't burn. 

Serve hot, keeps well in the refrigerator for a few days.

Tapenade Pizza

Pizza dough for 1-2 pizzas

Parmela kalamata spread

Black olive or kalamata tapenade

Veggie parm for topping

Roll out your dough and cover first in Parmela, then with tapenade. Bake according to the direction of your pizza dough recipe and serve with veggie parm if you like it.

If Parmela is not available to you or has problem ingredients, use whichever cream cheese substitute is friendly for you (like Daiya). If tapenade is bothersome to you, use black or kalamata olives to make your own in a food processor. Add garlic and limonolio for flavor. 

Fennel Pizza

To make the caramelized fennel:  buy one large fennel bulb per pizza.  Slice into 1cm rounds, I suggest using a mandoline, and cook on high/med high heat in a dry pan until softened.  When the fennel starts to wilt, season with salt and continue to cook until soft and brown, covered when needed.  When the fennel starts to stick, add a few drops of olive oil and continue to cook while stirring until the fennel is completely caramelized.  It will look like grilled onions when it's done.

Top your favorite pizza dough with Daiya Provolone slices, caramelized fennel, and sliced Field Roast maple breakfast sausage, then bake according to the directions.  To add flavor to the dough, season with fennel and salt, or anything else that will complement fennel.

You could use nutritional yeast instead of cheese slices, or maybe cashew cheese.  The sausage could also be any other seasoned gluten, or even baked apple chunks that are seasoned and sweetened with maple.

Israeli Couscous with Pesto

First, make pesto. To veganize this recipe, I increase the amount of pine nuts one tb at a time and used a few pinches of Daiya Mozzarella Shreds instead of Parm.  

Second, make your vegetable mixture.  Here you see grilled red bell peppers, mushrooms, and asparagus.  I also added canned artichoke hearts packed in water.  You could also use zucchini, eggplant, broccolini, or whichever veggies you like.  They do not need much seasoning because the pesto dominates the plate, so just a little S&P.

Finally, make your couscous.  The package gave instructions to cook it like rice, but this pasta is gooey and starchy, so I chose to cook it like pasta for use in salads.  Boil salted water with few drops of olive oil.  Add couscous and stir.  Bring back to a boil and cook until tender.  Rinse the pasta under running water and drain well.  Serve with a tb ot two of pesto per portion.

Surprisingly, this kept well in reusable containers in the refrigerator for almost a week. I think the bacteria is scared of all that garlic.  I prepared 1 cup of uncooked couscous to make 5 large portions.  

Ciabatta Pizza

Take one ciabatta loaf sliced down the center. Add water packed or frozen/thawed artichoke hearts, roasted red pepper strips, and Daiya cheese to one side.  Spread basil,pesto on the other side.  Bake at 350° until crispy. Nosh. 

The basil pesto was relatively easy, if not messy. I got the recipe here and substituted a few pinches of Daiya for Parmesan. Be careful not to add too much, Daiya melts well and can make your pesto rubbery. If pine nuts are bothersome, substitute with dry roasted cashews or slivered almonds. You could also try italian parsley and pumpkin seeds. 

Serves 8-12

Happy eating.  

Pasta alla Funghi--IC Friendly

1 lb of your favorite pasta

2-3 boxes of sliced mushrooms

1 large bunch of parsley, chopped

2-4 large cloves of garlic

Daiya Mozzarella shreds

Beyond Meat Beefy Crumbles (about half a bag)

Salt

Pepper

Olive oil

in one pot, boil the pasta until al dente.  In a large saute pan, sweat the mushrooms until they're dry-ish, then, add olive oil to fry them.  Add the garlic until you start to smell the aroma, then add the pasta.  When everything is cooked, add the parsley, Beyond Meat, and cheese.  Go easy on the cheese because it tends to make the pasta ball up in huge clumps.  

Serves 8-16, depending on your starch allowance.

A note for IC people, the garlic and parsley are very soothing when feeling irritated.  And even though they are soy free, check the Daiya/Beyond Meat labels for bothersome ingredients.  

Panzanella--A Fresh Summery Salad

You may have noticed that  I like salads, especially those you can take to a pot-luck or a picnic.  Panzanella is great because you can use leftover bread and extra veggies from your garden to stretch your budget or you could go out and buy the ingredients because it's a very refreshing lunch on a hot day. I have used leftover sourdough or rosemary bread; I don't usually have a lot of bread around the house so sometimes I buy something good just to make the salad.  When I'm sharing with others, I like to buy a bag of garlic croutons and let the salad sit overnight to soak up all the juices from the veggies.

You can add anything you think will work together.  I've used sweet peppers, tomatoes, vegan cheese cubes, basil, or whatever is lying around in the fridge.  My usual recipe includes tomatoes, cucumbers, olive oil, salt and pepper, vinegar and white wine.  For a party sized bowl of panzanella, peel and cube 4 large cucumbers.  Cube 4 roma tomatoes.  Dress the chopped veggies, then add a cup of hand shredded or cubed bread that has dried out and mix with the vegetables.  Using the bread dry allows the vegetables to release some of their water and soften the bread overnight.  If you are serving the salad right away, soak and squeeze the bread so that it's soft as you serve it.   

If you haven't seen the rest of my blog, I have recipes for garbanzo bean salad and tofu salad here too.  Sometime this summer I will make potato salad and post with pictures.

**Note:  To make this IC Friendly, omit tomatoes, wine, and vinegar.

Gnocchi and How to Make Marinara Sauce

I don't know what possessed me to buy shelf stable gnocchi from Target, but that's what I had in the pantry so that's what I ate for lunches that week.  I boiled the gnocchi according to the directions on the package, then added it to the marinara with diced Follow Your Heart Mozzarella.

Marinara:

1 can of steam peeled tomatoes

1+ clove fresh garlic

fresh basil

dry white wine 

red pepper flakes

salt and pepper

olive oil

Add oil to your sauce pot and heat on medium and warm the chopped garlic.  Salt the oil a little to reduce splattering and hand-crush the tomatoes one by one into the pot including the juice.  When it starts to boil, add wine and stir.  Stir in red and black pepper to taste, then shred about two full sprigs of basil by hand and let the sauce simmer, stirring occasionally until the liquid is reduced by 1/3-1/2.  The sauce is done when it has a fully cooked taste-no tinny tomato flavor, and it might have a bit of orange tinged oil on the top.  Salt at the end of cooking to avoid over-seasoning.  

Trader Joe's Dinner

I like the taste of food made from scratch, but sometimes I don't feel like dragging out all the pots and pans, and chopping everything.  So for these lazy days I buy par-cooked food from a store like Trader Joe's.  I got a bag of penne with sauce, a baguette, vegan cheese shreds, fresh tomato, fresh basil, good olive oil, mushrooms, and I appropriated my stash of LightLife Gimme Lean Sausage.

For the pasta, sweat then fry the mushrooms, crumble the sausage into the pan and brown.  Then add the bag of penne with sauce and cook through.  If you add vegan cheese, warm on low until melted.  For the bruschetta, pan fry thick slices of roma tomatoes in a good amount of olive oil.  After you flip the slices, seeason them with salt and pepper and add leaves of fresh basil and cover in vegan cheese shreds.  Leave the pan on a low flame until you finish toasting the bread slices and the cheese is very melted.  Let it cool before you eat them because vegan cheese burns as bad as regular.