Ok so full disclosure this recipe isn’t really mine. I have made some changes to an already existing recipe to make it vegan. It’s also not particularly low carb either due to the pastry.
However I wanted to do this one as when I was a kid I absolutely loved it. My mum bought this kids’ recipe book which was on sale at the library. There were 2 dishes in the book which were “mine”, ones I would always make. This was one of them, but with meat, and cream cheese and pastry made from dairy. The other is way too hard for me to attempt to make vegan so I’m not even going to go there. This one was super fun to make as a kid and my mum and I would usually make it together, it’s also really tasty and kind of reminds me of pizza. It makes a good light summer dinner paired with a side salad, even if you do feel kind of like a kid eating them. Of course as this was originally in a kids’ cookbook it’s a great recipe to make with your own kids and start showing them the basics! And because it has pastry and tastes like pizza kids will love it!
My version of this recipe uses vegan pastry in place of the usual animal fat or butter pastry. I have used this before and was adamant it was easy to find, but when shopping for ingredients I was proven wrong. It wasn’t at my local supermarket at all and when I finally did find it it wasn’t before I stood there at the freezer section for ages taking out numerous brands and examining all of the ingredients. But I found it. New Way Flaky Puff Pastry (they also do a sweet short pastry) at Countdown. Next replacement was a meat free version of salami which is the original ingredient in this recipe. Also not particularly easy. For some reason I thought I had seen vegan salami in the supermarket before but it seems I must’ve dreamt that. I ended up having to buy a vegan pepperoni online from thecrueltyfreeshop.co.nz (which is awesome by the way). My back up option was to just grab some vegan bacon rashers which are a whole lot easier to find, but I didn’t need to. If you can’t find vegan salami or pepperoni though the vegan bacon should work fine.
The vegan cream cheese is my cashew cheese recipe which you can find here
The original recipe uses tomato sauce instead of tomato paste. Feel free to still use tomato sauce but I went for tomato paste as it doesn’t have any added sugar, or anything actually. I ended up using less tomato paste than I would have tomato sauce as the tomato paste is far more concentrated and is quite overpowering when you use too much.
This brought back a lot of nostalgia for me and I had a lot of fun changing it up.
Original recipe is from the cookbook Family Circle Kids’ Cookbook 2.