Food Network Friday: Outside In Pizza Panini

That's right, it's Friday and here's the latest edition of Food Network Friday! A bunch of my wonderful cookbook testers joined in the fun and this recipe was chosen by Amy. It's originally from Rachel Ray and is very loosely written, leaving loads of room for veganizing.

Here's what we came up with, because we all really just want to get to the food, right?

Veg-in-Training came up with this beauty of sandwich. It's got yellow heirloom tomatoes, slow roasted tomatoes, roasted red peppers, Italian sausage, and Daiya cheese! Yes, that's a pretty basil leaf poking out, too. This is just the kind of dinner I'd love to dig into.


This one's from Anna Karenina and she went what she calls a more "traditional" route, complete with vegan pepperoni. Call it whatever you want, I'd love to try it. It's homemade focaccia piled with tofu ricotta, fyh and herbs. Here's the best part: it's also got a homemade spicy sun-dried tomato pesto. Check out her blog for the recipe and even a diagram!


Holy Shitake took a radically different approach by using chicken seitan and potatoes! I've never had potatoes on a sandwich and now I'm wondering why not. Her sandwich starts with homemade focaccia and is filled with black olives, soy cheese and spread with pesto, in addition to the seitan and potatoes.


Amy's computer is acting up, but here's what she did. We can only imagine how good this must have looked... and tasted.

"Sautee 1/2 onion, sliced, for 5 minutes. Then I added 12 green pepper, sliced, 1 clove garlic, minced and some sausage crumbles. Saute a few more minutes. Add 1 t. italian seasoning and a big pinch crushed red pepper flakes and a small can of sliced black olives. I used a round loaf of Italian bread. I spread butter on 1 side of each slice of bread. On the other side I layered store bought marinara sauce, vegan pepperoni, onion/green pepper mixture, then some FYH mozzarella. Topped it with the other piece of buttered bread (butter side out) and threw it on the preheated George Foreman. It took about 5 minutes to grill. Yumm-o!"

That Yumm-o is really getting into the spirit of things!

And here's my sandwich, which is probably the most basic of all these! I made focaccia using this recipe, but added 1/2 teaspoon each of dried basil and rosemary. Next time I'd double that. But it's a wonderfully easy recipe that I'll make again. Inside the sandwich was sliced tomato, basil leaves, black olives, sliced pepperoncinis, pepper slices, onions and....Daiya cheese! The cheese melted beautifully in this sandwich. A quick marinara sauce for dipping is on the side.


If you joined Food Network Friday this week, please post a link to your blog so we can see what you came up with, too! It's fun to see all the different takes on a dish.

If you're new to the whole FNF idea, here's the short version. Every other week, we're going to post a recipe here that is from any of the Food Network Chefs. It can be from a show, the website, a book...anywhere as long as it's from one of the FN Chefs. You take the recipe and veganize it however you'd like. Don't like one of the ingredients? Change it. Allergic to something in the recipe? Adapt however you want. It's all about making it YOUR recipe, so get creative.

Then on Friday of the next week, I'm posting a wrap up here. To join in, email me your recipe if you don't have a blog, or you can just post a link to your blog in the comments. If I hear from you, I'll be able to include you in the wrap up. We'd love to have you join us in showing the Food Network just how easy it is to eat well as a vegan.

The next recipe was chosen by Holy Shitake and it is........Banana Stuffed French Toast! I'll give it it's own intro post next week, but consider this a sneak peak. Results will be posted here two weeks from today, Friday, Sept. 18th. Join us!

In the meantime, don't miss the book contest in the previous post!

Happy Friday!