For the Love of Pizza!

I must admit, I have been a big fan of pizza my whole life. In fact I'd say it's a major contributor to all the weight I gained over the years. Too many pizzas ordered in for lunch at the office, then again the next night at home while too busy with work to cook, then again on a crop night at the store, and so on and so on. Of course overdoing the quantity pizza and laden with high fat ingredients certainly had a hand in it. So, over the past year or so on my weight loss journey, I have had very very little pizza. In fact I would say less than 5 times in the past 15 months and those were all veggie/healthier pizzas.

Today I was catching up on one of my favorite blogs - Kath Eats Real Food - and saw a beautiful whole wheat pizza with eggplant, mushrooms, dandelion greens and cheese, made by her husband (they are in the process of opening up a Great Harvest bakery so there's often drool worthy (but pretty healthy!)) food on her blog. [As an aside, can I just say how much I would LOVE to do what they're doing?]. Anyway, with some leftover eggplant already cooked in the fridge from sandwiches the other day, I decided I'd spend the afternoon learning how to make my own pizza dough and create my version of their pizza.

I found a recipe on Cooking Light, subbed 1/2 of the flour for whole wheat flour and got started. After over 6 years in this house I only realized today that my oven has a bread proof setting! How awesome is that? I mixed, kneaded and set it to rise/proof in the oven for half an hour. It worked! I rolled it out and set it up on my Pampered Chef pizza stone.

Then I prepped my toppings. I chopped up some rosemary and put it in a tablespoon of olive oil with some fresh ground pepper and salt. Then I sauted 1 minced clove of garlic in a little bit of olive oil and added it to the rosemary mixture. I sauted some mushrooms, heated up the leftover eggplant, chopped some fresh basil and italian parsley, cut up some compari tomatoes and shredded some monterey jack cheese.

To assemble, I first brushed the herb/garlic olive oil over the entire pizza and sprinkled with some oregano. Then I layered eggplant, mushrooms, baby spinach leaves and tomatoes. I sprinkled the fresh italian parsley over the tomatoes, then layered on the cheese and finished with the fresh chopped basil!

 

10 minutes in the oven at 500 degrees and here's my beautiful pizza! Now, to wait til after yoga class to tell you if it's any good or not (although looking at it, I can't imagine how it couldn't be!).

I roughly calculated nutrition on this and dividing into 6 slices, it's 350 calories/slice, 14g fat, 4g fiber, 8g protein.  (Without cheese at all it would bring it down to 250 calories/slice, 5g fat, 4g fiber, 1g protein.)