Pasta sauce 2 ways

In an ideal world I would make all of my pasta sauce from scratch. After all, it's easy, cheap, healthy & it freezes well.

In reality I'm just not that organised at the moment. So, when we inevitably resort to a jar of pasta sauce for dinner, our preferred choice is the Cherry Tomato & Basil from Sacla Italia.
This sauce is full of flavour, filled with lots of whole cherry tomatoes and has a pretty simple list of ingredients with no hidden nasties. An added bonus is it's readily available in regular supermarkets.Here, we used it as a pizza sauce, a job it performs remarkably well. This is a pita bread pizza with capsicum, mushroom, pineapple, olives and some diced cheezly. Normally I don't put cheese substitutes on pizza, but I had the end bit of a cheezly roll to use up.
The next evening we had pita bread pizza again - something you couldn't really do with regular calorie & cholesterol soaked pizza. This time the toppings were baby spinach, olives, mushrooms, capsicum, pineapple & creamed corn. All I can say is, yum!
The second use for our favourite jar of pasta sauce was to make a lazy-person's lasagne - specifically Chelsey's Meaty Lasagne.

I really liked this recipe - particularly the pine nuts on the top for something a little bit different. The flavours were everything you would expect from a traditional lasagne, but obviously much healthier due to the lack of dead animals :-)

The only thing I changed was doubling the white sauce quantity - I like my lasagne very saucy. Next time, I'll probably make even more again - there wasn't quite enough to spread on the top as I would have liked.

Poetic Pizza

I'll admit there's nothing particularly poetic about this pizza. But when I typed 'adjectives starting with p...' into Google it came up and I thought it sounded good :-)Just a quick post - this is a takeaway pizza from my local - Godfathers Pizza. It's a vegetarian without the cheese. Simple. $7. Delicious.

Risoni Salad

The sunny weather yesterday inspired me to make a salad for lunch this week (I'm so sick of winter-style stews). Of course, lunch time today rolled around & it was pouring with rain, about 14 degrees & blowing a gale - perfect weather for a salad! Melbourne really does my head in sometimes :-)

Unfortunately the fridge was pretty bare, but I did manage to scrape together enough ingredients to make a fairly healthy salad. I really love risoni, but I know refined pasta isn't all that good for me, so I don't eat it all that often. This salad is really simple & completely adaptable. I would normally add more fresh vegetables like capsicum, peas or asparagus but since I forgot to put my vegetable delivery in last week I was really scraping the bottom of the vegetable crisper. The simple oil, lemon & seasoning dressing for this is really delicious. Risoni Salad

• 1 cup risoni
  
• 2 carrots, peeled & grated
  
• 3 celery stalks, chopped finely
  
• 3/4 cup sliced black olives
  
• 1 400g can chickpeas, rinsed & drained
  
• 3 TBS olive oil
  
• 3 TBS lemon juice
  
• Salt & freshly cracked black pepper

Cook the risoni until tender (about 10 mins). Toss all the ingredients together & refrigerate before serving.

Continuing with D's birthday celebrations, we got takeaway for dinner last night - his all-time favourite meal - pizza. Now, we have some pretty nice pizza places in the West, but I've been disappointed to find that most of the 'gourmet' places add milk to their pizza bases. So, we usually just get Pizza Hut. It's cheap, veganisable & fast. One thing I don't like at Pizza Hut is the sauce - it's just tomato paste without any extra flavour - not even some oregano.

I got the Veggie Pizza Mia - it's supposed to have mushrooms, sundried tomato & capsicum, but mine didn't have any sundried tomato which was disappointing. I took away the cheese & added pineapple & olives. This is another gripe I have - why do I get charged for adding pineapple & olives, even though I took away the cheese? Surely I should at least get one extra topping for free when I'm saving them on such a significant ingredient! Oh well, I chose not to say anything last night, so I guess I should stop whinging :-)

Pizza & Pancakes

We made the trip to Eat Pizza in Maribyrnong last night, after reading about it here. I'm glad I had read this, because there is no indication when you walk into Eat Pizza that they are anything other than a run-of-the-mill takeaway - I couldn't find anything suggesting vegan-friendly anywhere! I was determined to persevere, so I picked up a copy of their takeaway menu, and there it was, at the bottom - Vegan Cheese & Vegan Pepperoni available - excellent news!

I chose the traditional Vegetarian (mushroom, capsicum, onion & olives) with Vegan Cheese & Pepperoni. Unfortunately we had a little accident with the pizza box on the way home, so it got a bit messed up - still tasted pretty good though. I liked, but didn't love, the pepperoni - in terms of vegan-friendly pizza in the West, I think Stefan's in Altona is slightly tastier, plus they have a much larger range of vegan pizzas advertised. Stefan's hours are quite limited though - only a few nights a week, so this could be our a backup when we have our rare cravings for pizza.


D chose the Margherita with Vegan Pepperoni & regular cheese. This looked great, but D wasn't a big fan of the pepperoni & said it definitely wasn't the best he's had.

For breakfast (well, lunch really, if I'm being honest) we felt like Scrambled Tofu, but alas, the tofu in the fridge was past its use-by date & not looking too healthy. I scoured the cupboards and the recipe books and came up with a yummy-sounding recipe for Spiced Banana Pancakes from Vegan Planet. The recipe was pretty straightforward & I ended up with quite a thick batter filled with chunky pieces of banana. Although I wasn't sure this would work being so thick, I decided to keep going without modification. The end result was thick & tasty pancakes, which we ate with Nuttelex & maple syrup. If I make these again I'll use extra soy milk to make a thinner batter - these were so thick some of them weren't cooked properly all the way through.