in the land of noms…

Green tomatoes have been taking vegan food blogs by storm. I have to admit, I’d never had them before either. When a friend recent gifted me with a bounty from her garden, I decided it was my turn to try my hand at them.

Since cleaning up my food act in the past few years, my tolerance for anything fried has greatly lowered, so I decided to employ my infrequently used friend, the broiler.

You know, I spent most of my life thinking that green tomatoes were some special kind of tomato, not realizing they are regular old tomatoes, but not red. Oops. Look at how pretty they are! I’m always a sucker for anything green.

Man cannot live on green tomatoes alone, so I had some quinoa going in the rice cooker and sauteed some onion, garlic, basil, yellow squash, black beans and sweet corn. When the quinoa was done, I tossed them together.

I drizzled the tomatoes with some balsamic vinegar and olive oil and then topped them with some bread crumbs mixed with fresh oregano, sea salt and a hint of nutritional yeast before popping them under the broiler. Lesson learned = less is more. If you go this route, broil on low, not high, unless you want to scare your cats half to death when the smoke alarm goes off.

From the leftover ingredients in the pizza rolls, I didn’t want to waste them, so a pizza was in order. This is my inner bachelor coming out, but I LOVE pizza. In a big way. I’ll eat froo froo pizzas, but I really just like the classic pie, with my favorite vegan twist- tofu ricotta.

Ready and waiting for the pizza stone, a visual testimonial to the fact that I can never get my Trader Joe’s pizza dough to roll out very well. Oh well, an oval pizza still tastes the same. Thick tomato sauce, Teese, ricotta, Yves pepperoni, mushrooms and kalamata olives. So simple, nothing crazy to it, but it’s my version of heaven.

Beautifully browned and waiting to be paired with some carbonated beverage. It almost brings a tear to my eye. We don’t eat pizza often because neither Jim nor I can be trusted to hold back from stuffing ourselves senseless and then we both end up sitting on the couch, bloated with a pizza hangover and feeling delirious with a strange sense of regret and delight. But it’s just so good!