Novelties: Veggie Pizza with Portobello Mushroom Crust

This was one of my more inventive ideas - along with Venergy Drinks, coming soon. I still think it is theoretically possible to pull this off, but I'm not convinced the effort is worth it, since you can cut the stem off a portobello to make a mini-pizza anyway.

The basic idea, though, was to make a pizza crust without using dough. I've played around with roasted portobello mushroom dishes and decided that if I threw some mushrooms in my food processor and added some oil, I could make a crust. I threw in a few cloves of garlic, because why not get that in the "crust" directly if you can?

Ingredients:
2-3 portobello mushrooms
2-3 cloves of garlic
1/2 cup (maybe? Eyeball it) olive oil
1/2 cup tomato sauce, or canned diced tomatoes with basil and oregano
diced veggies/toppings of your choice
cheese of choice - enough to cover

Then the toppings are just like a basic pizza. You could theoretically do whatever you want.

I baked it for over an hour at 350 degrees. The "crust" never cohered, and burned a little around the edges. Although you couldn't eat it like a pizza, which was my main goal, it still tasted pretty good.

I'm thinking an egg or something else with emulsifiers might work better to bind it if I try it again. I may try to make the crust thinner, too. Pre-cooking or drying the crust may help as well.

Taking stock

Vegetable soup is probably one of my favorite ways to actually eat vegetables, and it's great because you can pretty much put whatever you want in there and if the rest of it is okay, you'll be fine.

I've made it before with just water, and it's fine, but it's better with vegetable stock. Save up all the stuff you would normally toss - peelings, cores, stems, whatever - and then just stew it in hot water.

I feel weird even giving a recipe here, because it kind of defeats the point, but here's what I used:
- peels from two yams
- stems of 4 portobello mushrooms
- cores from 2 crookneck squash and 3 zucchini
- leaves from 3 leek stalks

You want enough water to cover at least, maybe more if you've got some really nutrient-rich stuff in there like kale or something. (N.B. - we'll cover recipes that leave you with yam peels, mushroom stems, squash cores, etc. later).

Bring to a boil; reduce to a low heat and let stew for a few hours, maybe longer. Everything should have become waterlogged, and the water should be a different color. Find a suitable container (I used another pot) and use a colander or strainer to filter the veggies from the water. Squeeze remaining water out of the veggies with a spoon before discarding them.

As you can see, I got an earthy brown vegetable stock. I decided to split it into two containers and refrigerate one and freeze the other. One would go to the vegetable soup, and the other to something completely different...