Vegetables for Breakfast Week. Day 3: Vegan Sausage Pepper Breakfast Pizza

By Day 3, I am beginning to see that this challenge is bit more demanding than I thought it would be. Especially since I am a "Sweet Breakfast Person". Josh is more into the savory stuff, so he woke up really excited for our breakfast plan, devised last night over drinks and bravado.

Breakfast tacos. Breakfast burritos. It would have been really easy to throw some ingredients together in a tortilla and call it my morning. I wanted to push myself a bit further, though. And of course, I was still looking for just a hint of sweetness to ween myself off of my typical fruit-filled breakfasts (agave-sweetened oats, smoothies, fruit/granola, cereal with berries/bananas).

Today's veggies: Yellow pepper. Onion. Optional Spinach.

Today's herb: Chive talkin'.

This breakfast pizza recipe is high in protein, low in fat, and quicker than it sounds (20 minutes including baking time). You can use seitan or tofu if you prefer, our veggie sausages were made with TVP. Because real life is unpredictable, we chose not to use spinach because we could not find it at our market.

Vegan Sausage Pepper Breakfast Pizza

2 whole wheat pitas
1/2 cup refried beans (canned is fine, but look for lower sodium, like Eden's Organic)
2 veggie sausages, crumbled
1 bell pepper, any color, cut it strips
1/2 cup spinach (optional)
1/2 an onion, diced
1 tsp olive oil
1 tsp chives
Hot sauce
Maple syrup
Red pepper flakes, to taste

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Heat olive oil in a pan. Saute onion and add spinach, pepper, and veggie sausage to pan. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes. Spread refried beans on pitas, add veggies/sausage mixture, and bake at 425 degrees for 8 - 10 minutes. Drizzle maple syrup (I used a liquor bottle pour spout to control the syrup flow) and hot sauce over pizza. Garnish with chives.

Makes 2 pizzas.

The sweetness of the maple with the wake-up hot sauce was a winning combination. Best savory breakfast yet.

Over the course of determining which vegetables to use this week, I found myself re-defining my idea of what a vegetable is. I came across this definition, which I really dig:

“Vegetable is a culinary term. Its definition has no scientific value and is somewhat arbitrary and subjective. All parts of herbaceous plants eaten as food by humans, whole or in part, are generally considered vegetables. Since ‘vegetable’ is not a botanical term, there is no contradiction in referring to a plant part as a fruit while also being considered a vegetable. Given this general rule of thumb, vegetables can include leaves (lettuce), stems (asparagus), roots (carrots), flowers (broccoli), bulbs (garlic), seeds (peas and beans) and of course the botanical fruits like cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, and capsicums.” (Wikipedia.org)

Veggie Recap:

Vegetables for Breakfast Week. Day 1: Carrot Waffles

Vegetables for Breakfast Week. Day 2: Spicy Avocado Veggie Toast