Soyrizo Pizza

Since I've started this blog, I have found myself wandering around grocery stores and looking at packages that are unfamiliar to me. This is how I've been able to cross several things (Dolma, Chicken Tikka Masala, Pocky, SPAM, Wasabi Peas) off of my lists. This is also something that I've been doing to get ideas for vegetarian food. That is when I came across this:

When I saw this, I was intrigued. Before I spent a week eating vegan last year, I had thought of food like this as a joke. It seemed to me that vegans really wanted to eat meat and they were coming up with clever ways to make foods taste like they were meat. In a sense, they were tricking people. After spending a week where I checked every single package before I ate, I realized that vegans aren't like missionaries trying to convert everybody around them. They are like monks living in self-deprivation. 

I was surprised how much I liked vegan food. The hardest part was monitoring every single thing that I ate. As it turns out, Soyrizo is an incredibly convincing argument that vegan foods can go toe-to-toe with meat. If I didn't know that this was made from soy, I would have never guessed that Soyrizo wasn't meat. The biggest difference was the texture, which was a bit loose for meat. But at roughly the same price and one third of the fat, it was something that I will probably buy again in substitute for meat.

I decided to try Soyrizo as a pizza topping and it ended up being one of my favorite pizzas that we've ever made. With the extra dough that we had left over from the pizza, Leigha made some cheese sticks. She took mozzarella and cheddar and sprinkled it with a pre-packaged "Italian Seasonings". Both the pizza and the cheese sticks were a success, even though it was the first time that we had ever made them. And without a recipe, too.