• August 10th, 2008mr meanercalzone, pizza, recipes

    There’s a Piazza in Rome with a small pizza house in it called “American Pizza Company”. It always makes me chuckle whenever I walk by – the terms “ice to eskimos”, “coal to Newcsatle” and “pizza to Roma” all imply the duplicative, perhaps unwanted and inferior activity of taking something to somewhere where there’s already plenty of it there.

    Now, while Americans don’t (Chicago pizza aside) have much to teach the Italians about making pizza, they did invent an interesting variation called a “Calzone”. When we in the west adapt a food item from another culture we instantly give it an overly authentic name, hence “Calzone” – can’t sound more Italian than that. We British did the same thing with Vindaloo – a fictitious “Indian” curry based upon, of all things, a Portuguese recipe.

    Anyway, while there are plenty of vegan pizza recipes around I thought it would be fun to set about creating a vegan calzone recipe, in honor of the American Pizza Company which serves a damn good, albeit non-vegan calzone.

    A calzone is basically a pizza folded in half with lots of extra ‘toppings’ tucked inside. The secret to a properly prepared calzone is to get the crust just right, and then shove in as many toppings as  you can without the thing bursting or leaking while it’s being baked.
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  • ahhh…sunday morning breakfast. what better way to begin the end of the weekend than with a stomach full of homemade vegan food?


    fantastic frittata: quarrygirl.com’s veganized version of the monterey frittata

    i REALLY love a leisurely sunday breakfast. 3 cups of coffee and a calorific vegan feast sounds like the perfect way to prolong the agony of the forthcoming week. but in a world where most restaurants are packed on sunday mornings and/or pride themselves on the fact they shovel heaping piles of eggs onto peoples’ plates, it’s hard for me to get morning meal satisfaction on the day it matters most. 

    this week, i found solace in this amazing recipe…located right under my nose, in the back of my cupboard, on the back of a tofu scrambler box. all it needed was to be veganized…
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  • April 20th, 2008mr meanerfollow your heart, pizza, products, recipes

    Ordering pizza was one of my favorite activities before I became a vegan. Now, though, that avenue of pleasure is firmly closed off to me since I don’t eat dairy. All is not lost, though — if you live close to Hollywood in LA, there’s always Damiano’s, but their delivery customer service is appalling (last time I ordered it took them nearly two hours to deliver a cold pizza — and that was when I lived under two miles away). There’s a reasonable frozen pizza option, but nothing beats freshly made pizza with ingredients you can select and add at will.

    So, I set about creating a similar experience to delivery pizza in terms of taste, timing and effort. I succeeded in two of those (taste and timing), but on the effort front, nothing beats the convenience of calling a ‘phone number to get hot food delivered to your home, just as nothing beats not being milked to death if you’re a cow.

    When I used to order pizza, it would take around 40-50 minutes from picking up the ‘phone to the local Pizza Hut to when it arrived on my doorstep. This method of preparing this pizza takes a little less time, but the end result is very comparable to delivered pizza if you’re happy to put in the effort.

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