Day 220

Mellow Mushroom Vegan Pizza: Even though I travel a good bit around the southeast playing music, I really don't find much new food out on the road. Due to lack of time and transportation, I usually end up eating the same things over and over, without much variation. However, that unexpectedly changed last night. The singer in my band recently decided to adopt a vegan diet, and while it seems like an insane choice to me, it did allow me to experience something new.

When we play private events, we usually have food catered or bought for us, and last night, our meal came from the ubiquitous Mellow Mushroom. Due to their apparently vegan-friendly menu, our singer was lucky enough to score a pizza that fulfilled his dietary requirements (the rest of us stuck to cheese and pepperoni). I stayed away from the vegan version at first, since the meaty/cheesy pie was enough to make me happy.

After we were done, we packed up and headed to the hotel around 3am. I was hungry, but me and the other meat/dairy eaters had demolished our pizza hours ago. Our singer offered me a slice of the vegan, and it occurred to me that it would count for a blog entry - score! I'd never had vegan cheese, and the crust was apparently vegan as well. Luckily, it didn't feature any toppings made from fake meat, but I did spot some green pepper and mushroom.

I didn't have any method of heating the pizza, so I had no choice but to scarf it down cold. The "Daiya dairy-free" vegan cheese appeared to have been melted earlier; honestly, the concept of fake cheese "melting" is a strange one to me. Anyway, I took a bite, and my first impression was that the crust had been made extremely soggy from sitting around for a few hours. Nope, that was the "cheese." It reminded me of gooey, runny, melted marshmallow, almost like the kind that results when heating up a s'more. It didn't taste like cheese at all, and for a cheese substitute, it was weak. Oh well, another reason why I won't be vegan anytime soon.

The crust was OK, but a bit dry and chewy due to the lack of butter/parmesan usually found on MM's crust. I definitely missed the garlic bread-esque flavor of the original. Overall, I'd say my relative enjoyment of this vegan pizza was due to my rabid late night hunger, but as a pizza substitute, it was fine at best.

Like I said, the vegan thing will never be for me, but I'm glad I at least gave it a shot.