Pizza Night

I finally got around to making that seed cheese last night. I found the recipe on http://www.almondessence.com/ I think the original recipe is too lemony, so I use just a tiny squirt of lemon and I skip the garlic just because I can't eat it right now. The cheese is a nice consistency kind of like ricotta cheese. I accidentally soaked double the amount of seeds, so I doubled the recipe. Besides pizza I'm going to have to figure out another thing or two to do with it in the next few days before it spoils.

Tonight I used it for pizza. I've made a few of these in the last couple months, none of them exactly the same. The cool thing about pizza is you get to use whatever you have. I use the basic recipe for a gluten-free crust from Easy Pizza Crusts (http://www.easypizzacrusts.com/Gluten-Free-Pizza-Crust-Recipe.html). I veganize the recipe by changing the milk powder to almond meal. The other substitute I make is I use guar gum instead of xanthan gum, but just because it's what I have. I mix the recipe in the food processor because it nearly burned up my mixer the first time I tried. I don't have a big stand mixer, just a little handheld. I find this recipe a little sticky, so I use a little quinoa flour to work the dough. The pizza pan I have has the little holes in it, so I use parchment paper on the pan, otherwise when I pushed out the dough it went down in all those holes and then it baked in there and my pizza broke apart and the pan was a pain to clean.

After the initial ten minutes, I brushed the crust with olive oil, and then sprinkled it with fresh chopped parsley, dried basil, dried oregano and powdered rosemary. Next I spread the seed cheese on with the back of a spoon. The veggies were fresh sliced tomato, fresh spinach (wet a little so the leaves don't dry out too much), and mushrooms sauteed in olive oil/fennel/sage/pepper to give it a little sausage-y flavor. I usually sprinkle the nutritional yeast right on the cheese because that way the colors of the veggies show better, but I forgot it at first. So this time, I sprinkled nutritional yeast and salt on top. (For those of you unfamiliar with nutritional yeast, it has a light cheesy taste and is a good vitamin B supplement. Personally I think it tastes more like cheese with some salt added to it). Other than the fact that I went a little overboard on the salt, this was the best pizza I've made yet. I'm actually getting to the point where I don't miss the old kind of pizza at all.

The salad was just mixed greens, the leftover tomato and spinach from the pizza, and an agave-dijon dressing. Then a glass of good ol' North Carolina iced tea (this one was decaf and sweetened with stevia though)

And yes, after those two tiny little slices, I did go back for seconds.