I’ve got to admit that I LOVE pizza.
I don’t indulge that often, but mainly because it’s rare to find a nutrient filled pizza these days.
I had some leftover roasted veggies in my fridge and a beautiful bunch of lacinato kale that was begging to be used. So I figured I’d set out to make a delicious AND a nutritious pizza. One fun dinner idea is to make the pizza dough ahead of time and let the kids come in and roll out their own pizzas and add the toppings of their choosing.
Assembling pizza is not rocket science, and this post is mainly to give you a few suggestions for a fantastic pizza. So I will just tell you what I used in the picture above (which I not is not beautiful, but the best I could do at the time 🙂
Pizza Dough
1 TBS. yeast
1½ cups WARM water
3 tbs. olive oil
1 tsp. salt
2½ cups white flour
2 cups whole wheat flour
To make crust, dissolve the yeast into the warm water and add oil and salt to that mixture. Mix the flours and knead them into the liquid mixture. Let dough rise in a greased bowl for about 40 minutes. Punch the dough and roll it into whatever size you would like.
Preheat the oven to 425 degrees.
I used a round pizza stone and baked the pizza crust BEFORE I put on the toppings. I didn’t cook it all the way through, but just about (roughly 8-10 minutes). This keeps the crust from getting too soggy from the vegetables (which carry a lot of moisture).
I then topped the pizza with
CHEEZY TOMATO SAUCE
1/2 cup raw cashews, soaked for an hour and drained
1 large garden tomato
1/4 cup nutritional yeast
1 tsp onion powder
Combine all of the ingredients into a high-powered blender and pulse until creamy.
The toppings on the pizza were:
Sauteed mushrooms (if they are pre-cooked, they don’t “leak” too much on the pizza)
Carmelized Onions
Oven-Roasted Tomatoes
Massaged Lacinato Kale (simply use your hands and a little olive oil and salt to help break down the fibrous walls of the kale)
A little bit of goat cheese for amazing flavor
I spread on the cheezy sauce (right onto the hot crust still on the pizza stone) and then added the rest of the toppings. Bake the pizza for another 5 minutes, or until the cheese is soft (since all of the vegetables are cooked, and the kale doesn’t really need to be cooked, this is just to finish off the pizza crust and warm the vegetables thoroughly).
Source: WFM 1-10