Garbanzo Bean Bruschetta + Pizza

At the moment I'm still apartment-less. Rob's been a great help with all the moving and shuffling around that's happened in the last few weeks (not to mention moral support) and let me stay with him the past few nights. Last night my book group meeting was cancelled so I decided to cook Rob a "thank you" dinner.

I knew I wanted to make some garbanzo bean bruschetta--a fantastic and easy recipe that my cousin Danny used to make for me when we both lived in Providence. I'm still trying to avoid gluten so I picked up some quinoa pasta for a side and planned to use grilled zucchini and eggplant in place of crostini for the bruschetta.

I got a little sidetracked however when I realized that my local coop just started stocking the new vegan pizza offering from Amy's Organics. Supervegan and a number of other vegan blogs had been singing the praises of this pre-prepped frozen dish and I had eagerly been searching my local markets for it. Needless to say, with the holy grail of frozen dinners standing right in front of my face, dinner plans were altered slightly.



I bought the pizza, returned the eggplant and zucchini, but kept my bruschetta ingredients. Usually I use about six roma tomatoes for this particular recipe but the coop had a special on "slicing tomatoes" from local farms so I bought two of those large babies instead. They worked about as well but I'd still recommend using the romas instead--the texture is better and they're easier to dice into small pieces (since we were topping pizza slices and not bread I roughly chopped the tomatoes).

(lovely camera phone shots)

Halfway through making the bruschetta I realized that I forgot one of the most key ingredients: garlic cloves. I used some garlic/parsley powder that I found in Rob's pantry--it worked ok taste-wise but wasn't the same as the real thing. I usually dress the bruschetta with balsamic vinegar and olive oil but opted instead to use some of this great Newman's own olive oil vinegarette that I'd recently purchased. Tasted good but for future occasions I'll stick with the balsamic.



The pizza was tasty but interesting. For anyone who's ever cooked with (or even just eaten something made from) rice flour, you know that it's very crumbly--it doesn't hold together the way that wheat flour does--it's much cakier. The soy cheese mix on the pizza was fantastic and the spinach, despite being frozen, tasted fresh. The crust was an issue as it was very soft and crumbly. For future dinners I'll leave the pizza under the broiler a bit longer than the box instructs.

(Final products--the cameraphone messes with the color--nothing was as "gold/yellow" as it looks).

On to the recipe:

Garbanzo Bean Bruschetta

Crostini (thinly slice a baguette, coat slices in olive oil, toast in oven for 20 minutes)

6 roma tomatoes, diced
6-8 leaves fresh basil, chopped thinly
small red onion or 1/2 a large onion diced
1 can garbanzo beans drained and rinsed
2 cloves garlic, chopped (really up to you)
balsamic vinegar, olive oil, S&P to taste (a couple of tablespoons of each liquid should be fine).
Toss in a bowl, coat everything well with dressing, and top the crostinis--you're done.