This pizza started out as a sandwich! A grilled pesto Caprese panini to be precise, but it was really ugly and I couldn’t manage to snap a half decent photograph. Yeah, it’s true: I’ll actually change a whole recipe around in an effort to make it prettier. But! I’ll only do so if the updated version is as good or better than the original, which in this case, it was. So you can make this as a vegan panini if you’re so inclined. The panini version actually used avocado in place of vegan cheese, but it totally worked. I couldn’t bring myself to put avocado on the pizza because all I could envision was a wide sea of green atop a pizza crust. Again, I’m focusing on aesthetics, but it’s a good thing! I was brainstorming vegan cheese ideas when my husband reminded me that ricotta cheese is excellent on pizza. I’d just about forgotten about that, but it was perfect for a vegan Caprese pizza, and so here it is! I’m just hitting the tipping point of having ripe cherry tomatoes come out of the garden daily (yay!) so I took the opportunity to put some on this pie. That was after I snapped the photo directly above, featuring great big tomatoes from the store. My photo is a lie but at least I admit it. I don’t usually make this big of a fuss over my recipe pics (as indicated by the food all over my drinking glass in Friday’s post. Opps.), but I guess this pizza is special. No, I’m sure this pizza is special. It was delicious! And perfect for summer. Basil, tomatoes, and it’s great hot or cold, which I guess all pizza is, but especially this one. If you feel like making a lazy version (which, hey, it’s toasty out, so who isn’t about being lazy?), feel free to use store-bought pesto (Amore is vegan), and swap out the ricotta with those avocado slices or even some store-bought vegan mozzarella, in which case I’d recommend popping it under the broiler to melt for a few minutes.
