Author Archives: efcliz

Redwood Vegan Pizzas

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The lovely people from Redwood Foods sent me some of their new products to try. I love this company to bits but one of the things I love most is they don’t sit still – they are always coming up with new ideas. Invariably, this means that sometimes products do get withdrawn too – the bacon Cheezly which always seems so popular with Americans and Canadians is the latest casualty.

I would generally always prefer to make pizza myself, but like everyone there are times when I’m too busy to cook or just want to throw something in the oven, and a widely available vegan pizza is an excellent answer. Getting in late from football last night after a weekend away was a great chance to try them.

The pizzas are available in 3 flavours – cheese and tomato, ham and pineapple and meatless feast, and cost £2.79, £2.99 and £3.19 respectively. My first instinct was that they are very small. I am a very greedy person, especially where pizza is concerned, and can easily eat a large pizza on my own. These would be a snack for one greedy person like me! We ate all 3 between the two of us without much difficulty.

I gave these the minimum time suggested in the oven, 10 minutes and they definitely didn’t need any longer. I tried them as they came first, then added some shredded basil to the cheese and tomato, and a drizzle of chilli oil to all 3 – I do that to almost any pizza I eat.

We both very much enjoyed these pizzas, and Matthew, who eats dairy, said he would buy one of these if he was on his own rather than get a dairy one. I liked all 3 of them, and I would never normally consider buying pizza with pineapple on. The pineapple isn’t very strong but the pizza had a lovely juiciness that the others didn’t. The meaty one was probably my favourite; it has a slightly spicy crumbly beef on which I don’t recognise from any of the existing Redwood meats.Obviously all 3 varieties use Cheezly and it’s nice and melty.

If I had my choice I would prefer to pay more for a bigger pizza, but that’s just my greed. I’d also prefer a slightly thinner base, but I’ve always preferred very thin crusts on my pizzas. These pizzas are not a fancy gourmet product with stonebaked bases – they are rather an everyday product but an extremely tasty and convenient one. I think they would be popular with children too. I have only once seen vegan pizza to buy in a shop in England, but I didn’t try it, so I don’t have anything to compare it with. But I would definitely buy these again and recommend them.

Vine and Dine – Blue Plate Special Wheat Meat Loaf and Gravy

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I pestered Tami for ages to let us do American Vegan Kitchen for Vine and Dine. Matthew has been saying for a long time that he wants to do a roast dinner with gravy to wine match, and as luck would have it, this meatloaf is one of the very few savoury dishes I haven’t made from that book, so everything fitted together nicely. I’ve made the Southwestern version, but for some strange reason, this one slipped past me both during testing and since I’ve owned the book.

Normally we use Vine and Dine as a way of getting to know a new or unfamiliar cookbook, but this certainly wasn’t the case here for me. I know Tami’s style and the sort of flavours she likes so I knew I’d like this.

The homestyle gravy was the winner of this meal for me. Deliciously savoury with a backdrop of red wine but not so strong as to turn it into a red wine sauce – I hate getting red wine or even worse tomato style sauces when I am promised gravy! The actual meatloaf itself could have been a bit firmer, but the sort of gluten we buy in the UK is notoriously finicky and so I’m passing that one off as an ingredient difference.

I served this with roast potatoes (proper British style basted ones), leeks and broccoli. I also turned the leftover meatloaf and gravy into a sandwich, which was almost better!

I’ve heard people criticise American Vegan Kitchen because the recipes use a lot of ingredients. I think they must be comparing them to all the quick and easy or low fat books which have come out, because I don’t find them too long, and it definitely doesn’t mean that the recipes are difficult. This was one of the easiest recipes for meatloaf I’ve tried, in fact. And, like all Tami’s recipes, being big on ingredients mean being extremely big on taste and flavour – making them perfect for wine matching. Here’s Matthew’s verdict:

Wine match for a Sunday Roast
Hmm, meat loaf, roasties and veg. Probably won’t call for a white! We’ve had a tradition of opening the big Aussie wines with this style of food, because it’s the closest vegans get to those really meaty plates that you mostly drink fine wine with. In this case it was a Brothers in Arms no.6 Shiraz Cabernet 2005, £14.40 from Tanners and certified cruelty free! Lots of good flavours in this one. All the sorts of summer fruits we eat in muesli, blackberry, raspberry, blueberry, also vanilla, chocolate, oak, and a good herby background from the Cabernet. It’s grown in Langhorne Creek, in South Australia, which apparently has the oldest known Cabernet Sauvignon vines in the world growing there. So stonkingly big, and really quite delicious with seitan. This combination should be listed in wine-food matching pages…