CSA Weeks 20 & 21: Pizza!

Here’s Week 20’s festival of greenery:


Pizza was easily the best thing we made during these two weeks, so I’ll tell you all about it. We bought a crust and can of sauce, because figuring out what to do with all these random vegetables week after week has made us lazy. We did sweeten up the sauce with some extra garlic, mind you. As you see, we chopped some spinach and arugula, then added sliced tomatoes and Daiya mozzarella. I believe some fresh thyme and oregano were involved, too. Props go to our new salad spinner for being the awesomest use of plastic since, I don’t know, plastic isn’t used for very many awesome things, but the salad spinner is one of them. See below for delicious pizza noms:


Oh, it was tasty. I think we finished it off the next day. The tomatoes made it a little soggy on the bottom, but so what. Soggy pizza beats no pizza at all.

Umm, what else did we have this week? Thyme. We froze it. Cilantro. We tossed it, because we have a ton of it and it’s tough to give away cilantro. Try it if you don’t believe me.

We had a veritable roasted vegetable orgy: beets, white radishes, acorn squash, butternut squash, sweet potatoes, and broccoli! Not all in the same pan, but close enough for an orgy. Here’s my plate, sans beets and radishes because I don’t really swing that way:


You’ll notice some parsnips and carrots among all the squash and sweet potatoes, because we used Vegan with a Vengeance’s Ginger Roasted Winter Vegetables recipe and they really do add to it. I love that flavor combo so much.

In this week’s biggest fail—and really, we haven’t had all that many fails since this CSA experiment began—we tried to reinterpret Vegan Soul Kitchen’s Yam and Mustard Greens soup using escarole. Oh, sweet merciful kittens, I did not like it. Sweet potatoes work fine in this soup, but mustard greens have a je ne sais quoi that is really essential. Escarole is just too…lettuce-y? I made Red eat it. He’s the best.

Onto Week 21 (or rather a continuation of the above, as both weeks really just smushed together):


I think we were still eating the roasted root veggies and broccoli, so not much new on that front.

See that weird-looking cabbage? Okay, maybe it’s hidden behind more of that goddamn escarole. Anyway, we got this cabbage that looked like it had come out of the cabbage mold all funny. It didn’t look sick, just misshapen. Pointy, like this:

Ripped from Hub UK. Don't sue!

As you will no doubt be unsurprised to learn, it is a pointed cabbage. Or sweetheart cabbage, if you want to be romantic like that. It behaves just like a normal, round cabbage, so don’t let its looks deter you. Red made coleslaw with half of it, and the rest was once more smothered with mustard seeds à la Vegan Soul Kitchen. That really is a delicious way to eat cabbage, and I recommend you try it.

It was pizza time again, this time with lovely green peppers and kalamata olives:


This pizza was even better, with the notable exception that I threw up right after eating the last piece for Sunday breakfast. I don’t know if the spinach or arugula got poisonous or what, but I was seriously pissed that our toilet got to enjoy the pizza longer than I did.

This, on the other hand, was a triumph. Veganomicon’s Sautéed Seitan with Mushrooms and Spinach is really delicious, but Red wanted tofu instead, so tofu he got. I crisped it up, then went ahead with the recipe. We had it over rice, and it was amazing.


You’d think we’d have been happy to get mustard greens given the disaster with that escarole soup, right? Well, we were, until we forgot about them in the back of the fridge and they got too wilty to salvage. I hang my head in shame. As for the new batch of escarole, I pawned that and the radishes off on my parents. Papa Burnout loves radishes, and Mom is always willing to try a new vegetable.

After that, we still had some green peppers and mushrooms left, so we thawed some spaghetti sauce (made back in the summer when we got tomatoes every week!) added the veggies, and voila! Super-quick weeknight meal. Sometimes simple really is best.

Vegan Drinks, restaurant-fail edition.

Apologies for my absence of late, beloveds. I don’t have a good excuse. I’ve just been mindlessly interwebbing elsewhere, and I’ve missed you!

After work on Friday, Red and I got dolled up and went out to the Baltimore Vegan Drinks happy hour. We’ve been to two or three before, and they’ve been fun. I was especially excited for this one, as it was held at Pizzazz, a brand-new Italian restaurant with a menu boasting plenty of vegan food. Plus, it was a joint event benefiting Compassion Over Killing. What could be better?

Oh my God, let’s see…a place to sit, menus, a restaurant staff that wasn’t totally cuckoo, a band that didn’t have the amps turned up to 11, clearly delineated food and drink specials? Shall I go on?

It started with the traffic. Obviously we can’t blame the traffic on either the event organizers (Paul, you rock) or the restaurant, but I can—and will, with extreme prejudice—blame it on the thousands of drunk Orioles fans and hopeless out-of-town drivers who conspired to snarl us in a vehicular web of SUCK. Opening Day, I hate you.

So, it took us a little longer than we anticipated to make it to Pizzazz. No worries there. The worry set in when we barely cleared the threshold before running smack into a wall of bodies more suited to a mosh pit. We saw people we knew, but couldn’t get to them. Half the tables in the nearest section were reserved. The band was setting up in a space entirely too small for live music, and the outdoor patio was closed. (To be fair, it was in the 50s, but we had been expecting outdoor seating, and most restaurants have patio heaters to warm things up al fresco.) No one really seemed to have a handle on what was going on.

An official-looking woman hustled us to a table with a few people we’d met at the last Vegan Drinks. This was okay with us, because we would have eaten dinner with Jabba the Hutt at that point. A harried waitress gave us our special event menus, just before a guy appeared and asked us if we’d been seated there or, I suppose, just sort of plopped ourselves down next to the bank of reserved tables. Once he was reassured that we weren’t trying to steal anyone’s seat, I stared down the drink list with a fervor that could only be slaked by numbing quantities of alcohol. I ordered something that was basically lemonade with açaí berry vodka. Red ordered Johnny Walker. His drink had alcohol. Mine, as best I could tell, did not.

“Look, Jabba, next time you wanna talk to me, I’m gonna need two tables. And plenty of vegan food.”

Food! Blessed, blessed food. I had never had Daiya, that mythical, melty vegan cheese that was rumored to change my life, so I went for a four-cheese pizza. It was decent. The cheese had melted, but in my hyperbole-soaked brain (what’s that? Daiya cures cancer?) I had been expecting gooey strands of faux-mozzarella stretching from the pizza to my mouth. It didn’t happen. That was okay. Red’s penne Bolognese was good, but we agreed that as a whole, Pizzazz really needs to up their garlic game. More is better, people.

And then the birthday party arrived to claim their reserved tables. Oh, sweet fancy Moses, that party. They were, for the most part, lovely people. I realize that it is irrational to be annoyed that people are cooing and squealing and hauling balloons and presents into a public space that happens to be right next to my head, but the dancing. As soon as the band started (too loud, decent rock covers, not a good fit for the space or atmosphere, better luck next time), two ladies decided to jitterbug in between our tables. Please envision two people trying to dance in an airplane aisle, and you have this scene. They thoughtfully moved their routine over to the bar, right in front of the entrance, but not before I pondered throwing an ice cube at them. I begged our waitress for a Yuengling.

Suddenly, our table was abuzz. What’s that? An honored guest! Whoever could it be? President Obama? John Waters? Holy shit, it was Bruce Friedrich, and if that means something to you, you’re way ahead of where I was on Friday night. Bruce Friedrich, our dining companions excitedly informed us, is one of PETA’s VPs. If you’ve spent any time on this here blog, you know that I bit my tongue and prayed to taste blood before I said something I would regret.

John Waters and Harris Glenn Milstead (aka Divine) ca. 1970s or ’80s. Ripped from Dreamland, which you should absolutely visit.

After that? Our sweet waitress understood that we really, really wanted to get out of there and regain our hearing as well as our sanity, so she figured out our bill separately and collected a decent tip for her trouble. (Note: I’m not bragging on our super-generous tipping habits, just pointing out that even in a shitty situation, treating your waitstaff with kindness and rewarding them with more than that meager 15% is the least you can do, especially when they do nice things for you like tally up your check instead of forcing you hash it out with the rest of your table of PETA-loving near-strangers.) We grabbed our things, pleaded anniversary plans—totally not a lie: it was our anniversary, just of our engagement, not our wedding—and booked it back to the parking garage.

The leftover Daiya pizza was excellent for breakfast. With a little garlic salt on top, of course.

As Vegan MoFo turns….

I’m just not feeling very foody today. I ate leftover Sweet Potato Soup for lunch. I made the Tortilla Soup last night, but neither of us felt like soup, so we had leftovers. Plus, I think the Tortilla Soup will benefit from extra time to let its flavors mingle. Red had another 30-Minute Vegan masterpiece, Stellar Stuffed Mushrooms. (Though he added shredded mozzarella, which he reported was not his best idea.) The recipe is for a bunch of little mushrooms, like appetizers, but we used four gigantic portabellas instead. I had Papa John’s.

I know, right? For dinner, I had cold pizza and a glass of wine. It was a good deal, though. We ordered pizza this weekend because Papa John’s has some loopy football offer where you get a large pizza and two sodas for cheap. Well, they brought us our vegan pizza (onions, black olives, green peppers, mushrooms, and tomatoes) and three sodas, for a grand total of $20 including tip. It was quite a pleasant change from Red’s original calculation. Finally, a reason to like football.

I think that might be it in the food department. I’m definitely looking forward to digging in to that Tortilla Soup later, though. Until then, I’ll be tempting myself with Kelly’s list of vegan Halloween treats!