Calzones and muffins

I'm very excited because this Saturday Jennifer McCann, who does this little blog, you may have heard of it ;), Vegan Lunch Box, is coming to the store to drop off our books (5 days early!) and to do a book signing. I was lucky enough to preview the cookbook to review it for Herbivore and it is everything we ever could have hoped for and more, so I'm really excited to meet her and get some signed copies for the holidays. And I do believe that Shmoo will be there too! I'll definitely report back this weekend with pictures.

We needed to hurry and finish up the Real Food Daily tofu ricotta cheese I made last week and we already did pasta, so I decided to make some calzones. I love pizza and adore marinara sauce in excess, so having a calzone that I can dip to my heart's content is just heavenly to me.


I used a great oatmeal pizza crust recipe from aTxVegan's blog. It was really delicious and nice change of pace from a traditional pizza crust. I added a heaping teaspoon of Italian spices to it. Inside we had black olives (olives are growing on me lately, thanks to Lebonese food), cremini mushrooms and sundried tomatoes along with a healthy smear of the ricotta cheese. I always lightly pan cook my mushrooms before adding them to pizza so they don't leech water all over the place. Nothing's worse than soggy pizza dripping with mushroom water.

After that I wanted something sweet and I was eyeing my copy of Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, but I'm going to be doing some special recipes from that this weekend and plus I didn't want something too sugary. So I pulled out Vegan with a Vengeance (I think the spine is going to crack soon) and paged through it until I got to these guys:


These are Mocha Chocolate Chip Muffins. But I really wanted some banana and had been eyeing a lone banana on our counter this evening, so I replaced the soy yogurt with a mashed banana and decreased to oil and soy milk about a tablespoon each to make up for the extra moisture. I also only used 1/2 cup sugar and 1 cup wwfp with 1/2 all-purp. I normally always make muffins jumbo size, but for some reason these were just asking to be made regular sized. So yummy.