Like most people, Pizza Night is our easiest weekly dinner. But we try to do it with a twist and make pizza night healthy. Can't be done you say? I beg to differ.
We used to make an Amy's Organic Frozen Spinach Pizza. Very quick and much healthier than take-out or Red Baron or something, but in an effort to cut the grocery bill and eat less packaged foods, I recently started making my own healthy organic pizza. Here's my basic formula for healthy pizza nigh:
- Whole wheat dough
- Fresh ingredients including lots of veggies
- Fresh fruit smoothie on the side
Every two weeks I make Whole Wheat Pizza Dough in my bread machine. It's a great recipe from The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook
I brush olive oil on my pizza pan, roll out the dough, transfer it to the pan, pushing it out to the size I want and building a bit of an edge.
I do buy Muir Glen's Organic Pizza Sauce and Horizon Organic shredded mozzarella (not pictured because they were out and I had to substitute conventional this time). You can certainly make homemade pizza sauce in big batches and if you live in a place where you can actually get good fresh mozzarella, then for goodness sake, buy that instead. Try laying it out in slices instead of shredding it.
I chop fresh spinach, slice tomato and sometimes slice fresh zucchini or mushrooms, too. I also like to use fresh chopped garlic. Of course you can do any fresh veggies you like. The more the merrier.
Then I start building my pie-- sauce first, then garlic, spinach, cheese and the other veggie slices on top.
Pop it in a 500F oven for 20 minutes. If you have the dough ready, this comes together super fast. 15 minutes, I'd say.
The smoothies are crazy easy but an important key to making a pizza night a well rounded meal.
Dump everything straight into a blender: 1 fresh ripe banana, a big handful of frozen blueberries, another big handful of frozen strawberries or raspberries, then filler up with Vanilla Soy Milk and set the controls for the sun.
Using frozen fruit eliminates the need for ice and the extra water that brings. You don't even have to buy the frozen fruit. Go to a pick your own patch or wait until the stuff is in season and on sale. Pick or buy up a ton of it, wash, dry and freeze in one quart freezer bags.
This is a thick healthy smoothies packed full of good stuff.
So there you have what essentially amounts to pizza and ice cream for dinner, but you've crammed in roughly 2-3 veggie servings and 2-3 fruit servings, plus soy milk and whole wheat dough.
It feels like junk food night, but it's not! It's vegetarian and homemade! It's easily one of our household favorites.
