gluten, dairy, and soy free pesto pizza with sun dried tomatoes

"but what do you do about pizza?!?!?!!"
-almost everyone.

although i never ate pizza that often, i am definitely a fan of a good quality fresh and tasty slice of pizza. and yes, i do miss it. i had finally come up with a gluten free dairy free pizza that i liked, but it used soy cheese (which i still think is a great cheese if you can eat soy). after i found out i had a soy intolerance as well, that eliminated most alternative cheeses except for this one cheese: Galaxy Nutritional Foods Rice Vegan- Soy and Casein Free Cheese Slices. There are three different types (american, pepper jack, and chedder, but only in slice form). If you are only dairy free, they have a variety of lactose and soy free cheeses. I avoid casein, so i can only have the sf/cf slices. Anyways, they don't melt very well, so they were out for pizza.

so anyways, i'm all for making everything from scratch, as i tend to do, but i'm really finding that i need to buy a few prepared things to not make myself starve and go crazy waiting for food to be ready. so i bought some frozen pizza crusts on a whim the other day at my new favorite grocery store. they are kinnikinnick foods 7" pizza crusts. to me they resemble a greek style gyro bread if you just heat them up, but they make a lovely pizza crust. it's hard to describle, but what i liked most about it was the flour texture on the outside that is like bread made on a well dusted board, similar to regular pizza crust. i think this is due to the sweet rice flour that's added to the dough when rollng it out.

so this is what i did for my simple and super fast and tasty pizza:

1. made some pesto (unfortunately these measurements are all approximate because i was just throwing them all in):
-approx 1.5 cups packed organic basil, 1 cup packed cilantro, 1/4 cup pine nuts, 1/4 cup cashews, 3 Tbsp chopped garlic, 1/4 tsp sea salt, 1/4 tsp pepper, 1 Tbsp nutritional yeast, 4 Tbsp good tasting olive oil
-throw the ingredients except the olive oil into a food processor and mix. gradually add the olive oil until well blended. taste, adjust flavors to your taste and go!
*i usually make a lot of pesto then store it in a container with extra olive oil on top which can later be used for pasta, eggs, etc.
*the nutritional yeast adds a bit of a cheesy flavor that's a great sub for parmesan

2. lightly oiled the top of the crust with olive oil.

3. spread pesto on top

4. spread toppings on (for my first one i used sun dried tomatoes and all natural cilantro chicken sausage from trader joe's (pictured above). for my second one i used sun dried tomatoes and roasted red peppers (pictured below). i also sprinkled soem crushed red peppers on top.

5. put in oven at 400 degrees for approximately 10 minutes (check periodically depending on your oven).

kind of silly to even give a recipe, but it was a great assurance that good pizza can be enjoyed even without all of the dairy, gluten, etc... (and quickly!)


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new adventures

i've been doing some new experiments over the past few days and have had success with 2 out of 3 recipes, so not too bad! :)

my first was with Whole Food's 365 Gluten Free Pizza Crust Mix.
I thought it would be nice for someone else to put all the various flours together for once, but i soon discovered that i still had to do a lot of work for it. Either way, I was impressed with the end results and would definitely recommend it. fairly easy to make in my lovely kitchen-aid and it makes two large pizzas (i froze the second half).

i used Ener-G's egg replacer since i was out of eggs, and it turned out quite well. i also used my favorite soy cheese, soya kaas mozzarella, some mushrooms and peppers, and made a tomato pesto sauce as well. i've since learned that soya kaas has casein in it, but they have another called vegi kaas which is supposed to be good as well. so for the mix i give it a 4/5 stars.


experiment #2-- the failure. i tried a recipe for apple quinoa muffins that i had found online since we still have so many apples from west virginia. they were okay, but left a weird aftertaste, so i said goodbye to them. lesson learned as well: quinoa flakes does not equal quinoa flour!

experiment #3- my favorite. i made karina's breakfast brownies, and i'll let the picture speak for itself... they were a hit :)
i actually stuck to the recipe and was really happy with the results. i used the quinoa, rice, and oat flour combo + tapioca starch as well as the egg replacer. next time agave ;) Highly recommend these!



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