Chocolate Mint Melties

I made these for New Year’s Eve and brought them over to the place where we were celebrating that evening. I made these with regular AP flour, and probably could have used to add a little more oil and maple syrup just because the batter was a little more dough-like than it should have been – I could have ended up with a rounder, less brownie-like cookie.

Dreena’s not kidding when she says to only bake these for 11 minutes and to be careful with them – I thought for sure that I wouldn’t be able to get them off of the wax paper (I need to switch to parchment) and the bottoms were very slightly burnt. However, once the cookies cooled off, the slightly “cajun” part was completely undetectable. I’ll take that as a win.

Trader Joe’s came through on the mint chocolate, so I didn’t have to go to Whole Foods or Henry’s to pick up a bar of the mint Endangered Chocolate. Trader Joe’s has something at the moment called Dark Chocolate Mint UFOs (or something similar, I’m not near the bag and I’ll have to fix this later if I’m wrong) – basically large vegan chocolate mint chips. If you look at the picture, you’ll see that there’s a half chip on the top of each cookie. Yum!

My omni friends said that they were really great and (I hate using the following phrase) that they don’t taste vegan at all. Word.

Recipe from Eat, Drink and Be Vegan. Dreena has kindly shared her recipe here.

Green Goddess Garlic Pizza

Homemade pizza crust, roasted garlic paste, pesto, basil-tofu ricotta, broccoli, garlic, spinach and capers.

I’ve missed making this! It really does kinda take forever, and it takes a ton of bowls, but it’s still worth it. I do prefer to make my pizzas whole wheat, but I only had AP flour in the house – oh well. This time, I omitted the green olives and replaced them with capers – thanks zpizza for the inspiration! I’m not sure that the spinach really brings anything to the table, but when  you have a pizza this full of olive oil, more vegetables is probably a good idea.

You can make the pizza dough the night before if you’re so inclined, but I’d prefer making the pesto and ricotta the night before. It may be a good idea to roast the garlic beforehand as well. Since I enjoy this recipe so much, I think I might try to make some less labor intensive pizzas in the future. With the exception of the pain in the ass making the dough is, I really don’t see why I should ever order pizza out again.

This is garlic flavored love.

Recipe from Vegan With A Vengeance. Isa has the recipe for the Basil-Tofu Ricotta here.

I’m not even halfway through my first bowl of this soup, but if I don’t update now, I won’t update for a while because I’m a little under the weather right now. It was almost worth getting sick to make this awesomepants soup.

I made this with chickpea miso and brown rice spaghetti, as that’s what I had on hand. Wonderful. Make this for everyone you know, RIGHT THIS MINUTE.

Laptop battery’s dying, smell you later!

Recipe by the always uber-neat Isa, find it here.

I’ve been wanting to try The Frankenstand for months, ever since seeing reports on quarrygirl. On Sunday, my spooky vegan hot dog dream came true at Madex’s GuerrillLA Drive In.

The Franken - Image courtesy of quarrygirl.com (it was too dark for me to take good pics of my own)

(I take mine with Vegenaise, BBQ sauce, yellow mustard, relish and onions, if you’re curious.)

I honestly don’t know how Raymond, the spooky owner of this spooky stand, makes Tofurkey franks taste so good, but bless his spooky little heart for figuring it out.

The Menu:

Me and my two omni companions all had Frankens, and boy howdy, were they delicious! Raymond is a super nice guy and he carries Pomegranate Hansen’s soda (always a plus!)

As for the movie, it was The Muppets’ Christmas Carol, and the drive in is a parking lot in Downtown LA – the movie is projected from a truck on to a white wall. There’s an amp that projects the sound (not blaringly so, it had to be turned up with a group of loud guys were passing by) and they use an unused FM station to broadcast the audio signal if you’re a coward and don’t want to hang outside of your car. It was cold, it was fun, and it was delicious. I see a regular activity in my future, and I can only hope that Frankenstand is there every month. Spoilers: Next month’s movie is Repo Man!

Follow The Frankenstand on Twitter here.

Follow GuerrilLA Drive In on Twitter here.

Red sauce, roasted garlic sauce, Daiya cheese, capers, tomatoes, artichoke hearts and basil. Yum!

I walked in to pick up this lunch pizza, and finally got to meet the owner – who recognized me from my orders and thanked me for all of my business. She was super cool, I love when places have great service along with a great product.

As for the pizza, I think the Tuscan has a rival. A big time rival.

I never thought I could love a pizza with red sauce, but I was so wrong. Baby, take me back. I can change! The garlic sauce on the red sauce mixed with the creaminess of the melted Daiya is pure heaven. I never would have thought to add capers to a pizza, but they’re an amazing addition.

THIS. IS. SO. GOOD.

Once upon a time, a vegan food porn blogger was married to a wonderful nerd. They broke up, and then a couple of years later, they finally divorced. But don’t fret! The divorce papers were signed over a surprisingly tasty breakfast at the 101 Coffee Shop – a lovely remodeled diner that makes you feel like you’ve walked into an early Tarantino film.

There’s a few things on the menu that are already vegan, no matter what time of day that you visit. However, it was early and all that was on my mind was breakfast. And here that means the “No Huevos” Rancheros.

The description on the menu: Tofu, black beans, corn, soyrizo, ranchero sauce, guacamole on top of corn tortillas.

Messy, but yummy.

It’s a little greasier than I would like my breakfast food (eh, I’m kind of picky in the morning), but this would make for the perfect hangover breakfast. The fresh squeezed OJ is delicious and the service is… a little slow. But! It’s really not bad. Give em a shot.

Everyone, please welcome The Pizza Cookery in Woodland Hills to the list of awesome omni places where you can get a great meal. They’ve added a vegan menu and a gluten-free menu as well – my server even came out with their ingredient books when I questioned why they had a Honey Mustard dressing under vegan options – turns out that it’s the Follow Your Heart dressing.

Don’t be fooled by the other Pizza Cookery locations in the SFV – the Woodland Hills location is unaffiliated with the other ones.

Check out the menu!

Personal Size

And the large. Omnomnom.

They use FYH cheese, which I’m not big on, but I’ll take it for convenience – not to mention that Follow Your Heart is pretty much a stone’s throw away. If they switched to Daiya, I’d spend a lot more time out in Woodland Hills.

I didn’t catch the brand of the vegan chicken, but even my omni friend thought it had more flavor than the actual chicken that they use on the regular version of the pizza (which is what he’s been ordering for year.) Now if only the free rolls were vegan.

Pizza Cookery

6209 Topanga Canyon Blvd (at Erwin St.)

Woodland Hills, CA

818-887-4770

In future entries:

A Tomato Joe’s Review

and also…

A brand new addition to vegan choices in SFV, at an old family run establishment. Bet you can’t wait to find out who!

My roommate and I believe that our apartment is single handedly responsible for keeping the pizza delivery business afloat in this economy, in our hood. Alas, we’re not frat rats or bros, and there’s not a delicious roofie in sight.

As we were piling our pizza boxes to the heavens (aka housekeeping), my latest zpizza order was at the door. I had ordered a veganized Pear and Gorgonzola salad, a veganized Tuscan (mmmm), and a (regular ol’ omni) pepperoni for a house guest. The manager threw in a free large Mexican Pizza as a thank you for my business,  which was a really kind gesture. Unfortunately, my houseguest was picky and didn’t try it, I obviously couldn’t eat it, but my roommate did get a couple of slices while it was still good.

zpizza, it was totally appreciated, thank you for the thought.

Now with marinated mushrooms and peas.

Funny, it was pretty good, but it didn’t bowl me over like the first time I had made it.

The anti-vegan roommate liked it, so maybe I’m just getting pickier in my old age.

Thome Yorke. Artist. Vegan. Some Kind of Mongolid. Strangely alluring.

I was going to cook tonight, and then blog about it. Instead, I managed to get tickets to tonight’s Thom Yorke show, so fuck all y’all. He’s vegan, so it counts for MoFo, right?

Edit: I just got home, and it was truly an amazing show. At most, maybe 600 people crammed into the Echoplex. I somehow got very close to the stage – maybe three or four heads back; I could count all of the scraggly hairs on Thom’s face.

I don’t know if it was because it was a Thom Yorke show, or because it took place in Echo Park, but when we left, we noticed that the obligatory street meat cart was serving veggie dogs. (The sign said in small print that there were regular ones, too. It was actually kind of cute.) I didn’t ask if they were vegan or anything, but they did smell delicious. Good on them!

See you on Monday.