Quick, Easy Pizza

I'm sure many of you are like me and are usually too busy or too tired to want to make a long, complicated recipe. I feel that way all the time so that's why I love pita pizza! It only takes 15 minutes to make, including bake time. All you need is pita bread, pizza sauce and whatever toppings you want on it. Below is how I make it but everyone likes different toppings.

Pita Pizza

What You Need

• Whole wheat pita bread
• Pizza sauce
• Spinach
• Onion
• Mushrooms
• (Soy) cheese

The Process

• Preheat the oven to 400 degrees

• Put sauce on the bread. (duh) 

• Put the spinach on the bottom. The sauce helps prevent the spinach from drying out in the oven. 

• After that, add whatever toppings you would like! Here's what ours looked like! 

• Top it off with the cheese and cook in the oven for 10 minutes. Cut up and serve :) 

Winner Winner, Tempeh Dinner!

We have tried a new vegan meal nearly every night for the past 7 days and Chris cast his vote for which one is blog worthy. He isn't vegetarian so I figure if he thinks they are delicious then the recipe must appeal to a larger audience than just us vegetarians/vegans.

The blog worthy recipe of the week is Tempeh Chili from Saving Dinner the Vegetarian Way. I've largely ignored this cookbook but we've tried nearly all the recipes in my two favorites so it was time to give this one a shot. I'm so glad we did because this chili was super easy and way yummy!

Tempeh Chili

What You Need:

• 3 tablespoons vegetable or olive oil
• 12 ounces tempeh, cut into small cubes. (I didn't know this before my mom told me but tempeh is sold by the tofu. Even knowing this I had to look for it because it was closer to the lettuce, weird.) 
• 2 medium onions, chopped
• 3 garlic cloves
• 1 (28oz) can tomato sauce
• 3-4 tbsp chili powder
• 3 tsp dried basil
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Cayenne to taste
• 4 cups cooked brown rice

The Process: 

1. In a skillet, sauté tempeh until lightly browned, about 2 to 3 minutes. Add remainder of ingredients (except rice) and simmer for 20 minutes. Serve over rice.

                               See, super easy! I topped it with vegan cheddar cheese. 

PS: I swear, one day I'll find my camera cord and post decent pictures. 

Meeting My Needs

        Nearly everyone who hears I'm a vegetarian asks the question "Where do you get protein from?" or "Do you get enough protein without meat?". I've always answered, "Yea, of course I get enough. I eat beans!" but I never knew for sure because I didn't know how to analyze my protein intake when I was making recipes. Let's be real, that would be a lot of math on my own.

        Well this week in my nutrition class we had an assignment where we need to track our protein intake for a day. We start with a formula to see how much you need. What you do is divide your weight in pounds by 2.2, this gives you your weight in kilograms. Then multiply that number by .8 and ta-da! you have how much protein you need in a day! After a normal day of eating I came only 2 grams shy of what I should be intaking. Not too shabby, in my opinion.

        Now, for the best part. I had homemade soup and a homemade chili for my meals, so how did I know how much protein was in it? Because today I just discovered http://nutritiondata.self.com/! You can add recipes and it will analyze it for you! It provides neat graphs as well as analyzing vitamin and mineral percentages. Whether you are trying a vegetarian diet or not I highly recommend this site to make sure you're diet includes everything you need! 

Building My Garden

Today was a sunny day here in NC! What a great opportunity to start working on my garden. Last year I had it in the backyard. Bad idea for two reason: 1) Only one of the dogs understood the mini fence was meant as a sign to stay out. 2) We have a great big tree in our backyard that provides plenty of shade. Great for a hot summer day, bad for growing veggies.
       
So this year, I decided to put it at the side of our duplex which gets lots of sun. Downside is it's also where we have thrown trash for the past year and a half. It's still not quite ready for the seeds and seedlings but I think it looks way better than it did this morning. Which means...before-ish (I had been working for 30 minutes before I thought to document the progress) and after pics! Yay!

                                    Before

                                  After!!!

I'm going to put a mini trellis in front of the ugly AC unit and have the tomatoes and cucumbers grow there. I'm considered painting it a light yellow. As for the other wire stuff, I'm still thinking about ways to make it prettier. 

Getting Better

I have done a LOT better this week. I still need to make conscious decisions/reminders to take off or replace animal products in meals but it's getting easier. I'm becoming more aware of the vegan options that are regularly available at my local grocery which makes it easier to use my vegetarian cookbooks and know what I can replace in the recipes with substitutes. This was a busy week, like last week, so I am extra proud of myself for the choices I made and from staying away from doing something easy and reverting back to old habits.
I ended up not making the vegan cheesecake this week because I didn't read the instructions well and realized the day of that I needed a spring form pan which I don't own. However, Chris did cook a vegan dinner for us while I was at work and had it ready when I got home on Valentine's Day. It was very sweet! Especially because he's not the biggest fan of this dietary change. We're trying a bunch of new recipes this upcoming week so hopefully something will be worthy of the blog!