The Pizza Problem



We have a pizza problem in my house. Probably we eat pizza three to four times each week for dinner. The frozen kind. It's fast, it's cheap, it's easy clean up and, you know, my husband and I just love it (the 12 year old daughter has been protesting it for some months now, smart kid). And we've been doing this since we got married nearly 14 years ago. I seriously love frozen pizza.

Knowing that I was launching a Monday, June 1 assault on all packaged foods, we indulged in one final frozen pizza Sunday night to say goodbye.

I am confident that - much like when I broke the full-sleeve-of-Chips-Ahoy-each-morning-for-breakfast habit I had from grade school through my late 20s - I will look back (someday) on frozen pizza and wonder was so compelling. (I shudder imagining the trans fats and other garbage I ate.)

To transition away from packaged foods and to maintain my pizza-loving family's buy-in on this effort, I decided that our first adventure would be a homemade pizza. Crust from scratch, sauce from scratch, loaded with chopped veggies and topped with only the slightest hint of some high-end (grated at home) Parmesan and just enough reduced fat mozzarella to melt all the veggies in place.

The pizza crust recipe I got out of a cookbook - there are gazillions of them and they are probably all pretty similar.

The pizza sauce recipe I winged on my own.

Pizza sauce:
1 1/2 ripe tomatoes, quartered
as much garlic as you like (we like a lot)
one fresh basil leaf (big) - and from my very own herb garden I just started (see pic above right)
some red onion
a squirt of tomato paste

Blend it all together in a blender. The fresh smell of this sauce is almost indescribable.

I chopped red onion, green pepper and the rest of the tomato that didn't make it into the sauce for the toppings.

Great news! Hubby and daughter LOVED the homemade pizza. In fact, here's a quote: "Awesome!" - daughter. Way better than the frozen kind.

So, how am I going to match this today? I have not yet made that meal plan (busy planting zucchini, making curtains and otherwise indulging in my Happy Housewife status). It is a shocking cold and dreary day here for early June so maybe some soup?

Diving into the Cooking the Whole Foods Way book today (sitting inside with a large cup of coffee) for inspiration, education and recipes, too.

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