When I asked for feedback last year regarding other ideas for vegan food celebrations, the great ideas you mentioned included vegan pizza parties. As I noted, our current focus would remain on vegan waffle parties, ’cause there’s still much to do. Thus, I was excited to see that VegNews, vegan blogger Quarrygirl, and Chicago Soydairy have teamed up to promote a new day celebrating a specific vegan food: Vegan Pizza Day (Saturday, January 29).
What’s great about this event is that it encourages support of restaurants offering vegan options, and it meshes nicely with the already-established Vegan Drinks events.
To honor Vegan Pizza Day a week early, and to help them get the word out, today we ate vegan pizza waffles for lunch. Hopefully this also provides an idea for those of you who don’t have vegan pizza in your area yet.
Yeast-raised vegan waffles, because of their slightly chewier texture, are best for this task. I had planned to bake up a fresh of waffles, but Jen talked me into reheating some frozen ones from a few weeks ago in the toaster. It worked very well. After toasting the waffles slightly, we topped them with spaghetti sauce, chopped vegan sausage, vegan cheese, a drizzle of olive oil, black pepper, and cayenne, and microwaved until the cheese was slightly melted. Jen petted LeMew to distract him from the waffles as I snapped a few pictures. (See his “overly curious” look?)
The Yeast-Powered Vegan Waffles recipe would work well for this, as would the Yeast-Raised Waffles, Yeast-Raised Gluten-Free Buckwheat Waffles, or Caramelized Onion and Garlic Waffles in the GVWC. (The Umami Mama Waffles, I’ve been told, taste like pizza even without any toppings–but it is hard to have too many toppings.)
I won’t reveal which specific brand of vegan cheese we used, although I will say that Chicago Soydairy’s delicious ice cream will be going on my waffles again when the weather gets warmer here. It’s hard to beat the vegan ice cream ‘n’ waffles combo–but vegan pizza waffles certainly satisfy the savory urge.
I hope the first Vegan Pizza Day has a great positive impact!