Moroccan Style Pizza

Here is a fantastic topping idea for pizza.  A tomato sauce base packed with the heady flavours of Moroccan Spices with toppings of sliced sautéed Aubergine, Chick Peas and Sweet Peppers.  And a scattering of peppery wild rocket and watercress.

Delicious!

Cooking has had to take a bit of a back seat for me lately …. as has the blog ….(who knows … where the time goes). What I do know, is that I feel so perfectly comfortable cooking vegan these days, I cannot conceive of ever eating animals ever again.  Vegan living is peaceable, and I love it.

One of the reasons I’ve been so busy, is because I have an allotment (community vegetable garden) and growing my own vegetables makes being vegan even easier, it has to be said!

Without boring you with all the details, here is a picture of my allotment.  Broad Beans in the foreground, garlic to the left, Apple, Pear and Cherry trees, Gigantes Beans on the right.  The strawberry bed is covered, because the starlings have been having a feast.  Further down there are potatoes, courgettes, peas, onions, carrots, parsnips and all sorts of cabbages.  Fruit bushes (red white and black currants, raspberries, blueberries, gooseberries) and rhubarb.  And there’s more besides.  Tomatoes in the small polytunnel on the right. Yesterday I planted 12 Florence Fennel bulbs, which will be a first if they don’t bolt    Watch this space ….. for fennel recipes … hopefully! 🙂

 

And here is my best allotment friend, boldly investigating the seed tin.  🙂

So food has to be quick and easy at the moment: Pasta, Briam (Greek vegetable bake) and vegetable stews. The sort of thing you can more or less throw together.

But the other night I fancied Pizza, so this is what I did.

Enjoy!

MOROCCAN STYLE PIZZA

Makes 2  x 32 cm. pizzas.

Ingredients: 

Okonomiyaki. Japanese Pizza.

I had been wondering what to do with the cabbage in my veggie basket.  I was thinking of stuffed cabbage leaves… because prior to that I’d been considering the grape vine that is now leaping into life over my garden shed and thinking that it would be nice to try stuffed vine leaves from scratch when the leaves get bigger….and that was but a short jump to cabbage leaves 😉  ….idle lateral thinking really…

Then I found a few recipes for stuffed cabbage leaves and they all looked a bit mid-winterish… and not what I fancied…so I carried on searching.  Until I came across Okonomiyaki.  I gather that Okonomi means ‘as you like it’ and Yaki means cooked.

You can put all sorts of things into it but one of the favoured ingredients is cabbage.

Now I think cabbage is a pretty under-rated vegetable.  For many of us, that probably dates back to the days when a pile of wet, limp, soggy, yellowy-green leaves appeared on our plate accompanied by the instruction to ‘eat your greens’.  Over-cooked boiled cabbage is rarely attractive…..

But there are lots of great recipes that put cabbages in a very different light. From curries to ribbons of lightly-steamed spring greens drizzled with vegan-butter and a pinch of salt, and from crunchy coleslaw to crispy kale, there’s a myriad of ways to make cabbage shine.  And here’s another one.  Because cabbage is a beautiful thing.

Okonomiyaki, also known as Japanese Pizza or Japanese Pancake is really more of a frittata.  Traditionally, it includes eggs, so I’ve taken a bit of liberty to veganise it: using chickpea flour, chia seeds and black salt.

There is also a special Okonomiyaki Flour that includes milled yam.  I’ve used chickpea flour and mashed sweet potato……

But I’m pleased with the results.  I shall be returning to Okonomiyaki again and again….

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OKONOMIYAKI

for 4

Ingredients:

Roast Vegetable Pizza

Vegan Pizza.

Here’s a nice idea, which is readily adaptable…for a tasty pizza where cheese is completely superfluous… all day long ! 🙂

For the base layer I sautéed finely grated courgettes with crushed garlic salt and pepper… and that worked out really well …will do again).

Ready-made vegan pizza bases are commonly available in the shops, but I can’t say that I’ve found one as good as home-made …and it really isn’t that much faff… you can even make a batch, and freeze the dough for future use….

Click on the image link for a recipe that includes a spelt flour pizza dough, but any flour of your choice will work…

 

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roasted vegetable pizza

Roasted Vegetable Pizza

for 3-4 pizzas

Ingredients:

Tarte Provençale

French cooking can excel in its simplicity.

Such as Tarte Provençale  : onions… pastry and onions.

I love onions.  I can have had the worst day, but chopping a few onions and dropping them into hot olive oil, and inhaling the fragrance that ensues, just makes the whole day go away.

For this recipe, the onions are cooked very slowly in oil.  So they soften without colouring.

Add garlic, with maybe a few olives, salt and pepper, and here I’ve added roasted yellow pepper.   And that’s it.  Simple.  Very.   And all the better for it.

tarte provencale

This tart is great hot or cold, lunch to go, and nice for a picnic.

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TARTE PROVENCALE 

FOR 4

INGREDIENTS:

Olive and Asparagus Pizza with Spelt Flour Pizza Base. Vegan.

The other day I bought a big jar of pitted black olives in brine very cheaply.  Greek olives.

I fancied pizza, and I thought it would be nice to chop the olives finely and spread on the dough base before adding other toppings.  It worked really well.  I will do it again. Personally, I don’t like an overloaded pizza.  This makes a pizza roughly 45cms. x25cms.

I used spelt flour as it is lower in gluten (but not gluten-free) and has a good flavour.  Spelt is my go-to flour of choice for bread as well.  Use whatever flour you prefer…

…or ready-made  pizza bases for convenience…

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vegan pizza tray bake

Here’s what I did.

OLIVE AND ASPARAGUS PIZZA

for 4

Ingredients: