Bits and pieces

I'm doing a lot in the kitchen in the last days but nothing that new - what doesn't mean that's nothing different going on.

Last Sunday Matteo (the pizza king of this house) decided to try Hanna's (Bitter Sweet) pizza white sauce that I've seen a few weeks ago and was very excited to eat. We bought Nutritional Yeast for the first time and used two different tofu (green and smoked) in the pizza and the result was amazing. The sauce is really easy to make and it's delicious. And I had it with a natural orange and grapefruit juice (L).


On Monday, Valentine's Day, after a busy day I baked a chocolate cake to Matteo. Yeah, I'm eating it too so it wasn't just his treat in the end!



On Tuesday, to keep going with the sweet tooth and also because I'm back on baking in a daily basis, I decided to give a try in a real decorating activity. Everybody in my mum's family is an artist, with amazing motor coordination skills and I'm not that good on this kind of thing. Anyway I decided to make a teddy bear from scratch. The result is here:



And also on Tuesday I made a risotto (again? yeah, you know I love it) with the last broccoli, carrot and parsnip of my first organic bag! Today we'll get another bag and I can't wait to see what's on it :D



So this is it. I have a giveaway to announce soon, so keep coming here :P

(vegan) Pizza Rustica

Last week was my first exam week of this semester. Three exams in five days (and I still have two to go). It meant that I wasn't working, wasn't going out and wasn't cooking. No fun at all. But has to be done.

Yesterday night I was really tired and didn't want to do anything besides trying to relax. Matteo decided to do his (now famous in the house) vegan pizza using a great ready-to-go pizza that we discovered recently. He can make the dough himself and he's pretty good on this, but he's being busy as well. He named yesterday's pizza "Pizza Rustica", or, pizza with everything you can find in the house.



This one had beef-style strips, mushrooms, artichokes, cherry tomatoes, and (after taking the pizza to the oven) rucola. And it was delicious. Yeah, I know, I love pizza and it's easy to make me love one, but believe me, this was really amazing!

What's your favourite pizza?


PS. Talking about pizza, January 29th will be the first Vegan Pizza Day. Go to the website or like the page on Facebook to know more about it!

Vegan MoFo III - Days 3 e 4 - Pizza

Well, well, I was hoping that we would finish moving yesterday but we are not done yet. I am not feeling that great so I can't help Matteo as much as I would like to do. But we are almost there and tomorrow we will be in our new apartment, bigger and beautiful (and one block away from the old one!).

But even the food comes at the right time. I was thinking about making my post number 3 about pizza and this is actually all we are eating these days. Not the great one that Matteo makes, but a good one from a pizzeria close to here (I took some pictures but the cable is at the new apartment and the computer is at the old one), so I chose this one that is from Matteo's family's in Italy. It was there that I learned that the Italian way to eat pizza is like that: one big pizza for each person! And that's the way I keep on eating it!



I really love pizza (as you can see here) and couldn't let it out of my Vegan MoFo top food!

Sorry about the short text but I have to go back to packing and unpacking stuff. Hope I can have internet soon at the new home :)

Cheesy weekend

In Brazil we don't have vegan cheese to buy. The only way to eat it is making a kind of cheese with nuts (recipe in Portuguese here). Everybody says that it's really good, but I never tried (must do it someday). So I stayed many years without considering the possibility of eating vegan cheese (I prefer don't think about things I can not have instead of staying suffering because I don't have them).

But here is different. We can find a lot of vegan cheese options and I just love them all! And last weekend we had a couple of cheesy days. On Saturday we had a delicious pizza night! Matteo is getting better and better on cooking pizzas (do you remember our first pizza? We never forget it!) and I'm enjoying to eat them at home. So we had two amazing vegan cheesy pizzas with cream cheese (Tofutti) and tons of cheddar (Redwood).


On Sunday we came back from the all ages gig starving and chose the faster option: pasta. But we still had some cheese left and Matteo improvised what would be one of the best pastas ever: vegan cheesy penne. I didn't take pictures because it wouldn't be fair with that great recipe(it looks like a normal pasta with white sauce but it's so better!). All you need is pasta, salt, oil, soy cream, cream cheese, diced cheddar, parsley and stock cube. Boil the water, add some salt and the pasta (let cook until the way you prefer it - “al dente” or well cooked). In a separated pan put the oil, the soy cream, the stock cube and the parsley. Mix everything and add the cream cheese and the diced cheddar. Let cook until the cheddar is softened. Put the sauce on the pasta and that's it, done! Easy, fast and superb!

Two other related posts:
Pasta: Fast and delicious
Pizza: Everything ends in pizza!

Celebrate good times, come on!

We had a great time last Saturday!

Finally, we Matteo decided to cook our version of “Colcannon” and "Cock of the North". I'll never stop thanking What The Hell Does a Vegan Eat Anyway for all inspiration.

He cooked mashed potatoes and did the sauce with mushrooms, onion, garlic and vegetable sausages. We also added some rice to complete our meal. It was so, so delicious and it's really easy to cook. Yes, I really love all recipes with potatoes!



And later at night we ate some pizza with a lot of vegan cheese ;o)


This week I wan to take some good pics of the Brazilian version of vegan hot dog that we always cook here. Let's see what I'll get!

The first pizza ... we never forget!

One of my first posts here was about how much I love pizza. Last saturday we finally cooked our first vegan pizza. I mean cooked the dough too. We made it using the recipe of the awesome blog What The Hell Does a Vegan Eat Anyway? and just changed the toppings.

For the toppings we used: tomato sauce, garlic, mushrooms, vegan sausage, red tofu and cream cheese.


I don't know if it was because the dough wasn't that perfect, but it took more time to bake it than it's written on the blog, but in the end everything went right! I can say that our first pizza was really good and we'll have many chances to make it better!


This experience was amazing and I can tell you again that it is always worth to cook with pleasure!

Everything ends in pizza!

In Brazil we have an expression when the issue is politics that says “Everything ends in pizza!” It started on sports, with a political internal fight in Palmeiras (a soccer team from São Paulo with Italian founders), during the 60s. A reporter went to the Palmeiras club office to cover the attempt of agreement between the parts, and it went on a surprising way, with both sides happy. To wrap up the agreement, everybody went to a pizzeria to celebrate. The next day, the newspaper published "Fight in Palmeiras ends in pizza." The term, by the time, have being used to refer to all the fights in political scandals and accusations because at the end everything ends up well (for them). Nowadays, the term is very popular and had replaced the other one "everything ends in samba".

Well, I have to agree that when something ends in pizza, it is really cool! Pizza is awesome. I really don’t need any reason to go out to eat pizza or to ask for a pizza at home. But, if somebody needs one, I can give you tons of reasons!!

I had heard that the best pizza ever is made in Napoli. That makes sense. South of Italy is famous for the pizza. I have never been there, but I tasted a “Napolitan” one some days ago in a pizzeria in Bologna (picture) and it was fantastic! The biggest difference I can notice between the Brazilian pizza and the Italian pizza is the bread base of the pizza and the tomato sauce. In Italy the base is thinner and vegan (in Brazil some places use eggs or milk, don’t ask me why!) and they use a lot more of tomato sauce, which makes all kinds of pizza good, including the simplest one: marinara, which is made with tomato, garlic, oregano and extra virgin olive oil.

After eating the marinara pizza, I can say I am very happy being vegan! You can ask one and add whatever you want to be put on it: anchovies, mushrooms, olives, etc. It’s awesome!! I really could eat this everyday! Ah, I almost forgot the craziest thing in Italy about pizza!! You ask one pizza for each person!! And a big one! In Brazil pizza comes like clothes. You have all kinds of sizes: individual, small, medium, large and extra-large. And you choose it considering the number of people that eat it. Here no. If you are 4, you have 4 pizzas.

The only thing I still want to do concerning the pizza theme is going to London or US to eat a margherita pizza, with vegan mozzarella. That’s like a dream and I know I will realize it, so prepare yourself to another pizza post in the future.

And this post ends in pizza! ;-)