Notzarella Pizza

We love pizza.  I know everyone says that, but we REALLY love pizza.  I make this pizza about once or twice a fortnight.

I've been making this style of pizza for about 4 or so years.  The dough is the VWAV recipe.  I'm super lazy and make it in my KitchenAid stand mixer.  Damn that thing saves me time!

The secret ingredient to our pizza is Notzarella.  In our opinion this is the best vegan melting cheeze on the market.  And it's an Australian product!  I normally get two pizzas out of a block (I grate it all at once and freeze the second half - the dough recipe makes two pizza bases too, so I get to be lazy the second time around).  And in the last few weeks (or so) the block size is up to 300g, so it's even more cheeze!

The other toppings are (all purchased from Green Edge) are: Redwood Cheatin' Pepperoni Style Slices (half the pack), Lamyong Vegetarian Salted Crispy Chicken, and Lamyong Vegetarian Soy Sausages.  I use pizza sauce from the supermarket and add Smoky BBQ Sauce.

I get the best results with the dough when I cook it on a pizza stone.  I preheat the pizza stone in the oven for 25 mins as high as my oven will go.  Once the pizza goes in, I turn the temperature down to about 200C.  The Notzarella usually takes about 25 mins to melt at this temperature, but it may depend on your oven.  You can always finish it under the grill (if you have one!).

Before it went into the oven

After!

If you live in the land of Oz, hunt this stuff down and eat lots of it!  (This is not a paid Notzarella advertisement - I just love the stuff)

Gnocchi with frizzled leeks, mushrooms and truffle oil

I made the biggest batch of gnocchi this evening.  I started out with 2.5kg of potatoes (I knew I should have weighed them at the fruit shop).  Which turned into about 3kg of gnocchi.

Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of the dough - it was huge!

I made the gnocchi specifically to use the truffle oil that we got from Green Edge.  The recipe was based on something I had in a fancy restaurant eons ago.

Things to do next time: work out how to pan fry the gnocchi (the entire bottom of the pan was covered in potato bits), add more truffle oil, fry for longer so the gnocchi gets crispier.

NOM!  I got two gold stars from Cam for this one.  Luckily I have ballet ALL DAY tomorrow (WOOOO!) so I can probably afford a few extra calories.

Can you believe I took this photo on my phone?  Samsung Galaxy for the win!

Mac and trees for lunch

Nom!

Basic white sauce (1Tbsp margarine & 1Tbsp plain flour cooked into a roux, add 4 grinds of pepper, decent amt of salt and 200mls soymilk, heat until thickened, add pinch of nutmeg, 1/4tsp mustard powder and 1Tbsp of nooch) with quickly fried mushrooms and half a head of broccoli.

Perfect for a Saturday afternoon of Practical Legal Training and then 2.5hrs of ballet!

Hello? Anyone out there?

Hi everyone!

We're still alive, it's just that uni and work has gotten in the way for the last two years.  We are both still vegan and cook for ourselves on a daily basis.  Big fans of Green Edge.  It's a two minute drive from our house and we visit at least twice a week (so we may be a little more portly than before, lol).

Still into cooking.  The fajitas from 500 Vegan Recipes are eaten at least twice a week (when capsicums aren't the price of gold).  We're having Veggie 2 Go burgers tonight (here).

We've booked a trip to the USA in October.  We're flying into Los Angeles on October 6, driving slowly up through San Francisco, Portland and into Seattle.  We're then flying into Maui on October 21 and getting hitched on October 24!  Pretty darn excited!  (I'm making the dress - it's white-ish and is a knit fabric, so there is much swearing involved in the sewing.  I'm getting some new Melissas to wear (don't tell Cam).)

If anyone has suggestions for places to visit, we'd love to hear them.  We've got two days in LA, San Fran, and Portland.  Obviously I want to visit Real Food Daily, Portabello and Millennium (I'm going to have this video in my head when we visit that restaurant, not that Cam will get the reference).  I'm planning to eat my weight in vegan food while we're in the US - Whole Foods/Trader Joes beware!

So I'm going to start posting with a little more regularity (and we're hoping to blog a lot of our food while we're O/S).  The food mascot has been decided, and will be unveiled in an overly dramatic manner before we leave the land of Oz.

To tide you over until I make a complicated dinner, here's a pie from Vegan Pie in the Sky.  It's a Salted Chocolate Caramel Tart on a Shortbread Tart Shell.  It was VERY sweet, but gooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood.

(Damn that's a crapola picture - must remember to start doing fancy food photography).

Mmmm Caesar Salad….

So yeah, summer’s over!  Where did my holidays go?
It’s been lovely keeping up with everyone’s blogs.  I think the Australian vegan blogging world is waiting with baited breath for Theresa and Andy’s nuptials (or is it just me?)!
Anyhoooo, uni is back and I’m crazy busy as always.  I’m going to try to do short blogs, rather than long exciting ones this semester.  Four law subjects + 3 days a week of work = Amy gets no sleep!
So, Cam decided that we needed a garden (and I agreed), so we got some mini hothouses from Bunnings (‘cause we have very active possums!).
Checkout the awesome cos lettuce – isn’t this stuff meant NOT to grow so vertically?

So I made Veganomicon Caesar Salad with Fry’s Chickeny Strips (I have no recollection of the name and I’m not linking to their uber annoying flash website!) and Redwood fake bacon.  Damn this was tasty!
Hopefully it won’t be another three months before I post again!
Amy

Tian Ran – OMG, seriously, OMG……

It was pretty damn amazing.  We miss Magic Wok so much.  I remember when I heard about it closing, it was like a part of me died.  Yes, I’m being melodramatic, but as much as we love Kuan Yin and Loving Hut, we really don’t have a replacement for Magic Wok.  Sooooo, we decided to drop into the Gold Coast and visit Tian Ran on the way home from Byron Bay.  Woah – the Gold Coast and Byron are polar opposites! 
Enough ranting, food:

Mmmmmm we’ve become addicted to the young coconuts from Woolworths thanks to Cam’s sister.  They’re probably incredibly bad for the environment, being flown from Indonesia/Thailand, but OMG, soooooooooooo good.
Entree 1: BBQ Pork Buns

Not as good as the Magic Wok ones (they weren’t bright red in the middle), but they were good.  Very ‘meaty’ texture inside.
Entree 2: Crispy Fish Strips

From the taste, Cam worked out that these were probably Lamyong Fishy Strips (no idea what the real name is).  They were really nice (and that’s saying something, ‘cause I’m not a fan of the fishy substitutes).
Entree 3: Chicken and Corn Soup

I’ve had this soup before – Cam brought some home for me when I was writing my thesis and he went to the land of the leather people (the Gold Coast) with friends.  Nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom nom !
Side dish: Nasi Goreng

This was delicious!  I don’t know what I was expecting, but it was delicately flavoured (tomato and chilli powder).  And super super yummy.  (I’m going to run out of superlatives soon!)
Amy’s Main: Salt and Pepper Chicken

Deep fried tastiness.  We thought these were Lamyong Soy Nuggets.
Cam’s Main: Black Pepper Chicken

Again Lamyong Soy Nuggets.  It had that tasty cornflour glaze thingy that Chinese food has.  Not too peppery – Cam really enjoyed this.
Cam’s dessert: Banana Fritter

I can’t vouch for the flavour (I don’t eat banana), but Cam had a huge grin on his face the entire time he ate this.
We really enjoyed Tian Ran.  The service was great and not too fast.  The guy who owns it (we presume) was really lovely.
It was a great end to a fantastic weekend.

Byron Bay Food

Howdy!  So the hell of exams is over, so I’ve started back at work 4 days a week and have been spending the Friday doing criminal law research for a lecturer.  It’s actually pretty fun, just hard to do in the heat!
Anyhoooooo, Cam and I went down to Byron last weekend to visit his sister and to generally spend time on our arses at the beach.

Broken Head Beach, Monday morning
We spent Sunday leisurely driving to Byron Bay, stopping at Minion Falls @ Nightcap National Park (best name ever).  Which was fun, except we got caught in a thunderstorm at 2 in the afternoon!  Leeches really are gross…

Funny, I remember it being calmer than this! 
We then spent Monday at two different beaches.  Morning was at Broken Head Beach (the two posts above) and Watego’s – closer to the centre of Byron (not pictured ‘cause we actually went swimming).

Terrible turnout

There’s two awesome vegan health food stores in the middle of Byron Bay – Santo’s and The Fundamental Food Store (Fundie’s – they have a store in Brisbane’s Paddington).

This deep fried tastiness was Monday’s lunch.  The two pastries were yummy (one was a samosa, and the other was delicately flavoured veggies), Cam had the tempeh sushi (ew ew ew), and there was a bean fritter.  Sooooooo good!

Luckily the Woolworths at Byron had Tofutti cream cheeze – so there were bagels for breakfast on both days!  Nom nom nom…

This was from Santo’s various salads and amazing pies.  Plus, in front, a millet ball and a rice ball (we shared).  This was sooooo good!

Byron Bay’s famed unicorn farm sign…
It was a fantastic weekend! 
We visited the Gold Coast on the way home on Tuesday and visited Tian Ran!  I’ve got a whole post’s worth of pics, so they’ll go up soon!