Vegan Pizza Party

Sorry about the break in posting, but its been a busy week.  Last week I had a vegan pizza party, went to the green festival at Navy Pier with Priya (and volunteered afterward sorting through trash to recycle everything and stabbed my finger on some broken glass), worked, had a day of translation meetings (which went awesomely), cheered Michael on at a 5K, cooked, and visited my dad for the weekend.  It's been a lot of fun, but not a lot of time for posting.  So anyway, here's a much delayed post on my awesome pizza party.

Priya graciously made the crust while I was still at work, using wheat flour, which turned out pretty tasty and seemed to compliment the tons of vegetables pretty well.  I just read an article that basically said if you want better, more flavorful crust, you have to make it the day before and let it rise more.  As it was, we let it rise for at least two hours, so I will have to try this next time.

Crust:
 3 cups whole wheat flour
1 package active dry yeast
2 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
1 cup warm water (not too hot or cold or the yeast won't grow, around 110 degrees)

Combine flour, salt, sugar, and yeast.
Add oil and water.
It works better if you allow it to rise for a little while, but I've also used it right away, so it doesn't hurt.

Spread this out in a greased pan, using your fingers to gently push it to all corners of the pan.

Using a spoon, spread some pizza sauce around (we used ragu, you can also make your own but I didn't have the ingredients.  I think you might be able to use 2 parts tomato sauce, 1 part tomato paste, and then a few tbsp oregano, but that sounds how you start spaghetti sauce so don't quote me on that).

Now comes the fun part.  We basically topped our pizza with every vegetable we could think of, so just add what ever you want.  I would advise trying new things, if you're not sure you can add something to a corner of the pizza, some other topping to another.  You could make it like a pizza venn diagram to explore the intersections of taste.  Or you could just do what we did and pile on tons of veggies until the vegetable layer is 4 times as thick as everything else.

Our toppings:
Tomato, red pepper, red onion, white onion, olives, spinach, parsley, garlic, broccoli, mushrooms

Isn't it ironic that I hated any type of vegetable topping on pizza until I became vegan?  Now I adore it.

Anyway, we finished by topping it with daiya mozarella cheese, which melted nicely and tasted great.

Bake at 375 for about 25 minutes.

	Once I start getting stuff from my CSA (June 11th!), I'll have to make pizza again.  This is making me hungry. I also made peanut butter rice crispies for dessert, but that is for another day.