Cooking for my parents

Last week I was in Colorado for a conference. The weekend before the conference, I spent a few days seeing my sister and her family, my aunt, uncle, cousin, and my parents. It was good to see everyone!

I made a couple of things for my parents during my brief visit.


My dad had some vital wheat gluten and nutritional yeast. So I decided to make vegan sausages.


Look at all the cast iron! I am super duper jealous.


This was the best way I could come up with to steam them.


What my mom was doing while I was cooking. Making a quilt for my nephew!


Chickpea gluten sausage, broccoli and carrots, and brown rice.


My mom and I were chatting and she started looking through my food blog when she came across the recipe for the Bubble Up Pizza Bites. She made some dough in her bread machine and then we rolled out pieces and filled them with tomato sauce, olives, and mushrooms. She put cheese on half of them. We rolled the toppings so that the dough was completely enclosing them. I think it works better that way, even though it is no longer "bubbling up". Pretty tasty!


My parents had two bananas reaching the end of its life. I decided to make some banana bread with it before I left. I used the recipe from here and it came out a bit dry, but it was still tasty. I did not use the sesame seeds on top, although they sound really good.

Notes
Lately, my seitan has not been coming out super duper well. It is slimy and not well formed. I'm not sure what changed in my seitan skillz, but they are lacking now. My parents were nice enough to eat the seitan and say that it tasted good. Also, since we have gotten the rice cooker, I have a hard time making rice on the stove top, this came out a bit gloopy. Not my finest culinary moment.

Freezer Meals: Bubble up pizza bites

My husband and I spent an afternoon making a bunch of meals for the month this past weekend. We have started to eat on our freezer food and man it is good and easy to have things that are ready to eat.




Ingredients
pizza dough - we used a pre made one that is for a 12 inch pizza
pizza sauce
any toppings you desire - we used onions, black olives, and daiya pepperjack cheese

Method
Grease a 12 muffin muffin tray. Divide the pizza dough into 12 even balls and place one in each of the muffin cups. Push the topping down into the dough. Really get in down in there. Top with a teaspoon of the pizza sauce and any vegan cheese.

Bake for about 15 - 18 minutes at 350F, until the dough is browned.

To freeze: place the muffin tray in the freezer and allow the bites to partially freeze - about 15 or so minutes. Take out of the tray and put into a gallon sized freezer bag. To reheat, place the frozen bite in a toaster oven and cook at 350 for about 10 minutes until heated through. You can also, heat up in the microwave for a minute or two. You can also put these frozen in your lunch box and by lunch time they are thawed. Heat up in the microwave for about 30 seconds until warmed through.


Notes
I have a confession: I am not a daiya cheeze fan. I think it smells like stinky feet and tastes rubbery. I decided to give it a try, but I am now going to be giving away the rest of my bag to friend. I'm glad that I didn't cover all the bites with the cheeze. Other than that, these are really good! I didn't shove the topping down far enough to the dough, so they came out on top instead of "bubbled up" around it. My husband also enjoyed these, although, he said it took him about 15 minutes for them to cook in the toaster oven for him. Super easy and delicious!

Geez, we don't just eat pizza around here.

Freezer Meals: Pesto, potato, mushroom pizza

It will take one more day to finish of making all the rest of the freezer meals. I think we have three more to do. I'll post a picture of the inside of our freezer when it is done. We aren't making allll our meals for the freezer, just about half of them. Although, we did have a friend over tonight and ate both of the pizzas we had frozen, so we aren't going to make it quite all the way to the end of the month with our recipes.

For those that are lost, my husband and I are trying to cook a good majority of our meals in advance and then freeze them. We are using recipes from Once a Month Mom. All the recipes we have tried so far, have been fantastic.



Tonight, we decided to break out the frozen pizza. From frozen, it cooked in a preheated 350F oven for about 10 - 15 minutes. Before we froze the pizza, we had parcooked the crust for about 8 minutes before adding the toppings and freezing.

Ingredients
Kale Pesto
1/2 bunch kale
1/2 cup slivered almonds
a couple of garlic cloves
salt
black pepper
olive oil

Mushroom bits
12 oz mushrooms sliced
2 T olive oil
2 T maple syrup
1 T soy sauce
1/2 t liquid smoke

pre made pizza dough - just the usual dough for about 12 inch pizza
Any other toppings you desire - we added garlic, potato, and onion


Method
Kale Pesto
Process the kale, almonds, and garlic in a food processor until chopped up. Add seasonings. With the processor processing slowly drizzle in the olive oil until it is the desire consistency. Adjust for any seasonings.

Mushroom bits
In a bowl, mix the mushrooms with the liquid ingredients. Allow to soak while the oven is heating up to 400F. Spread on a cookie sheet lined with foil (for easy clean up). Cook in oven, stirring occasionally, until crispy. I didn't really get these to a crispy stage, just cooked well. Set aside to cool.

Pizza
Roll out the dough to desired size. We divided the dough into two pieces and rolled them into their own pizzas. We needed to make the dough fit inside of a gallon size freezer bag. Also, a pizza made from all the dough is usually too much for one meal for two people.

Place the dough in a preheated 400F oven for about 8 minutes until the dough is mostly cooked through. Spread the pesto on and top with any topping you desire. At this point, you can wrap in plastic wrap and put in a freezer bag and freeze until needed, or you can put it back in the oven and cook until the toppings are heated through the bottom of the pizza is brown.


Notes
I was a little bit wary of the pesto, when I tried it after processing it, we both thought it tasted like the way fresh cut grass smelled. The flavor mellowed out on the pizza and worked really well with the kind of sweet mushroom topping. The pizza over all was delicious. It was really fun to come home and have a frozen pizza that didn't have a bunch of weird ingredients in it. Both my husband and the friend we had over, loved the pizza.

Of course, we topped our pizza with a drizzle of sriracha.

If the freezer meals continue to be awesome, we are doing this next month and every month after that. It's like eating frozen meals from the grocery store, but they don't have a bunch of things in there that you don't want and it took three days to put all the food together! We are loving it.

Grilled Pizza

Yes, another pizza post. This time, we grilled the pizza!




Ingredients
We used similar toppings as in the last post: tomato sauce, potatoes, olives, onions, rosemary, salt, pepper

Method
We tried both parcooking the crust and not parcooking and I liked it both ways, but my husband preferred to not parcook the crust.

Roll out crust in circle, place on a clean grill over hot coals. Add the tomato sauce and toppings. Put on the lid and cook until the bottom is browned and toppings are cooked through.

If you want to parcook, place the crust on the grill, cover with top. Cook until brown on the bottom, turn over and put sauce and toppings on. Cook until everything is browned and warmed through.


Notes
We both really liked this a lot. The grill marks and flavour from the grill is amazing. I would like to do this again!

Pizza!

My husband and I regularly make pizza. Well, I usually sit on the couch, drink wine, and chat with my husband while he makes pizza. The recipe below is all based on my observations with some input from him.




Ingredients
pizza dough (bought from the grocery store. Now that we have a bread machine it will be easier to make our own)
homemade hummus
potatoes
sun dried tomatoes
olives
caramelized onions (we made these in the crock pot. Super easy.)
basil
oregano
rosemary
red pepper flakes

Method
According to the husband:

The pizza dough is really hard to roll out, so I usually roll it out a bit, then put it in the cast iron skillet to heat it up some. When it is warmer, I roll it more and go back and forth until the dough is of a sufficient size.

The thinly sliced potatoes are cooked in a bit of water in a sauce pan until they are par-cooked.

Now that your dough is sufficiently large, spread the hummus (or tomato sauce, it tasted better then the hummus when cooked) over the dough. Top with the tomatoes, tomatoes, onions, and olives. Top with the seasonings. Bake at 450F until golden brown, about 15 minutes.

Notes
The first time I had potatoes on a pizza was when I was hanging out with my friends Mark and Laura and they had just found some potatoes from their garden and they made it to the pizza. I was surprised at how good they are on it. Try it, and you may like it!

We were experimenting with making a large scale hummus pizza. It tastes much better when the hummus is not heated. So I would suggest using tomato sauce. Not that it is bad, just not as tasty as it could be.

Veggie Calzones

This is a meal my husband made with all his awesomeness.





Ingredients
pizza dough (we picked up dough at the grocery store)
veggie sausage (Tofurky Italian sausages)
onions
garlic
mushrooms
olive bar olives
tomato sauce

Method
Preheat oven to 400F. We do this in the toaster oven and it cooks just as well as in a regular oven.

Sauté the onion, garlic, and mushrooms in a bit of olive oil until browned. Add the veggie sausage and cook until heated through. Mix in the olives at the end.

Roll out the pizza dough in a 12" circle. Put on a tiny, little bit of sauce. Add the ingredients. Fold the dough over to create a semi-circular parcel. Bake in oven until browned about 20 minutes.

Fantastic! Both my husband and I love this a lot.