Slow This Ride Down: Caveman Cafe: Paleo Pizza with Cashew Cheese

First I just wanted to say that we don't eat comfort foods everyday!
With school starting though, I'm just trying out some new recipes to have on hand for the kids.
Normally we eat tons of veggies with tiny sides of chicken or fish. I promise! lol
But it's nice to know I can fix some "normal" foods for the kids, foods they miss but won't give them all reactions.

OK, first off the "cheese". I learned how to make this when I was a vegan, it's pretty crazy but works so well!
Does it taste like cheese?
Well, no. But it is the same texture and looks similar so it substitutes well.
And the taste it does have is very yummy, different...but delicious!

I don't have the cookbook where I learned this from, but I kinda remembered how to make it as I never followed her recipes exact anyway (hers always called for lemon juice and mustard and things I didn't like). The cookbook was, The Uncheese Cookbook by, Jo Stepaniak

Anyway, the one that I remember how to make calls for carrots, to give it an orange tint. So, after I had made the cheese the kids said "Hey, we are making pizza....it should be white!" I hadn't even thought of that...my cheese did look like "cheddar". Next time I will try adding cauliflower instead of carrots so it can be white, and make this cheese for taco salad!

You have to make this the day before you need it as it has to set for quite a while.

Cheddar Cashew "Cheese"

1 3/4 cup water
1/2 cup chopped carrots
5 tablespoons agar agar or 4 tablespoons gelatin

1/2 cup raw cashews
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
3 tablespoons tahini
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon parpirka

Bring the carrots in the water to a boil and then simmer for around 15 minutes or so.
Add the agar agar or gelatin and cook for 5 more minutes.

Add everything else to the blender. Then add the carrot mixture, after it cools down a bit.

Pour into a greased mold of your choice, I just used a rectangular Tupperware container.

Pop in the fridge until morning.

And it will look like this!

The cool thing is that this stuff slices, shreds, and melts! Here is mine shredded and ready for the pizza!

Ok, so next we needed a crust. I looked around at quite a few different paleo blogs and combined a few recipes and came up with this for my crust.

Coconut Flour Pizza Crust

6 eggs
2 cups coconut milk

1 cup coconut flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

I beat the eggs, beat in the milk.
Mixed up the dry in another bowl. Then added the dry to the wet.
It was like a thick pancake batter.

I put some parchment paper on a cookie sheet, one small and one medium, smeared olive oil all over the paper, and then spooned the batter on top and smoothed it out.
They looked like this:

Into the 375 degree oven they went for 20-25 minutes. They shrunk up quite a bit! But looked very yummy!
Here they are after I took off the paper.

Ok, so then I put on some sauce, the cheese, and our toppings! On one pizza we put nitrate-free ham and pineapple. And on the other we put beef, mushroom, tomatoes, olives, and green onion.
Here they are before I popped them back in the oven, just until everything was hot:

And here they are...all done!

Now, the kids have been missing chocolate milk so I have been trying to find a replacement. We can't do rice or soy but we can do nuts.... so I was soooo excited to find Unsweetened Chocolate Almond Milk!!! It's just almonds and cocoa but it's not bitter at all, really smooth and creamy, they loved it! It's a bit pricey though, but will be a nice treat for once in a while. The plain flavor is awesome too and will be good for Alex to take to headstart in his lunches.