Italian extravaganza!

Lately I've had a hankering for italian food - not the fancy pastas, but the pizza/calzone/breadstick-type food. As those of you dealing with a milk allergy know, italian food is particularly tricky because almost all popular italian dishes contain cheese or cream. I have tried a couple of vegan recipes that substitute tofu for cheese, such as in calzone and lasagna, and they've come out okay, but those recipes typically take a lot of time.

These last couple of weeks, I haven't had time for recipes like that, so instead I whipped together two very quick, very easy, and very yummy dishes: (1) cheeseless pizza with sliced tomatoes and olives and (2) pepperoni roll-ups. Both, of course, involve some sort of quick-baking Pillsbury canned bread (and by the way, did you know that if you pay attention, you never have to pay full price for those things? My Kroger frequently runs sales on the crescent rolls and pizza crust, and I've also found oodles of coupons for them).

Anyway, here is #1, the pizza:

All I did was unroll some Pillsbury thin-crust pizza dough onto a cookie sheet, put 1/2 can of pizza sauce on it (I like Muir Glen brand) and cover it with some thinly sliced tomatoes and sliced black olives (straight from a can). I also threw some ham on it too. Pepperoni would have also tasted awesome on it.

And here is #2, the pepperoni roll-ups:

The secret recipe is this: I rolled 3 slices of pepperoni up in each crescent roll and sprinkled some garlic salt, basil, and oregano on them. After baking them according to the package directions, I used the 1/2 can of leftover Muir Glen pizza sauce for dipping. As you might note, I tried to counterbalance the relative unheathiness of the pepperoni roll-ups by adding broccoli to the plate. I used a lemon sauce for the broccoli, the recipe for which is in the Vegan Lunchbox cookbook (see sidebar for cookbook details).

Given their ease and yumminess (not to mention that it's fun for the kids to dip them!), these roll-ups are probably going to make a regular appearance at our dinner table.