Pizza pie baby!

I have missed pizza so much.  Some cities have pizza restaurants which cater to plant based diets very well, but our little city does not, at least not that I have found.  I know I could just order a pizza sans cheese, but that just doesn't sound very good. 

We needed to get pizza on our dinner rotation and get it going soon.  We actually ordered a regular pizza on Halloween night.  It was Halloween, and we deserved a treat, right?  Well, the cheese covered pizza wasn't that much of a treat.  It tasted really good, but we both could feel it the next day, not in a good way.

This weekend I used my old pizza/French bread recipe, and whipped up four pizza crusts.  I do it the lazy way, using my Pro Kitchenaid mixer with the dough hook, but it could certainly be done old school.  I par-baked all four crusts.  This makes for a much crispier crust, as the pizza toppings don't sog out the crust.  I cooled one of the pizza crusts and placed it in the freezer for a quick weeknight meal.


I already had homemade marinara and pesto in the freezer.  I put the marinara in a pan and reduced it to a pizza sauce consistency.  I caramelized some onions and red peppers for toppings.  Additional toppings were black olives, one sliced up Tofurkey Italian sausage, and marinated artichoke hearts.  



From what I have read and heard from others, vegan cheeses are really not very good and not worth the cost.  I had read that vegan mozzarella was the best of the vegan cheeses, (or least bad maybe).  I was feeling like taking a risk and bought some shredded mozzarella.  There is not much taste to it, but regular mozzarella doesn't have a ton of flavor either.  The package stated that the cheese melts and stretches, (which is one of the chief complaints from people regarding vegan cheese).  Well, I sure didn't see any stretch out of it, and it barely has any melting action.  Having said all that, we enjoyed the vegan cheese.  The key to us was to put very little on the pizza.  Maybe it's more of a visual thing, instead of looking at a naked pizza.

We loved the vegan pizzas very much.  My husband commented that he liked them just as much or more than the non-vegan pizza we used to eat.  We are real pizza snobs, so that is saying a lot.