Tag Archives: pizza

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Recipe: Petit Veggie Pizza

Since the winery is going to have a Petit Verdot Vertical weekend soon, I’ve been working on creating some new recipes that utilize this amazing wine.  This recipe is one of the creations I made when trying to come up with something that’s vegetarian.  You could easily add some sort of protein as a topping, but I thought this was really tasty by itself.  PetitVeggiePizza

I started with the whole-wheat pizza dough recipe that you can find on my blog.  If you have a pizza dough recipe you like, by all means, use that one.  If you don’t want to be bothered with making your own pizza dough, feel free to stop by your favorite pizza place and ask them for some dough – many are happy to sell you enough dough for a small/medium/large pizza.  I really wanted to know the nutritional analysis for the dough, so the recipe I used worked well for me.

Once I stretched out the dough to the size I wanted for my pizza, I started working on my vegetarian topping.  In this instance, I used Gunther’s Spicy Black Bean Dip (I had about 1/2 cup left over in my fridge), some salsa, a handful of frozen corn, some taco seasoning, and some James River Cellars’ Petit Verdot red wine.  After mixing this together, I realized that I needed something to give it more volume, so I grated one small green zucchini into the salsa mixture (see the middle photo on the left).  This is what I used as my base/topping for my veggie pizza.  I spread it over the entire crust and then topped it with a cup of pizza cheese before popping it into a 425-degree pre-heated oven to bake.

As easy as this sounds, it was just as delicious.  The zucchini gave enough volume to the pizza so my dinner was very satisfying as well as being really tasty.  Pizza is one of those meals where I could put almost anything on a crust and I can be happy, so this was a fun meal.  If you’re getting bored with your own meal planning, try putting something unconventional on a pizza crust…. you might find that you’ve created a new favorite dinner.

Have fun being creative!

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Recipe: Pinot’d Pizza

Ok… I’m almost embarrassed at how easy and simple this pizza was… well, almost.  The wine portion of this meal came from simply “thumbing” some Pinot Noir over the pizza that I put together tonight for dinner.  Honest!  It’s a lazy, Friday night, so here’s my favorite way to make a homemade dinner without a huge amount of effort… and here’s how I put everything together.

I started with a trip to my local pizza place and purchased a medium size pizza dough for $4.00.  Seriously… $4.00 and I had enough dough to split into 2/3 dough for my hubby’s pizza and 1/3 dough for my own pizza.  It’s the perfect “single-serve” amount of pizza for dinner for me and the cost is totally worth it.  NOTE:  if I’m planning on feeding more people, I would obviously purchase more dough.  My boys like thicker pizzas, so I would have picked up a medium size for each of them and do our 1/3:2/3 split for us.  See if your favorite pizza place sells dough… it’s a huge timesaver!PinotPizza

I had thrown the dough in the fridge when I got home, so I pulled it out to rest for about an hour before starting to make our dinner.  M and I have things down pat when making pizza for dinner.  I make the crusts for everyone and then, together, he/I add all the toppings and such.  My pizza tonight consisted of jarred pasta sauce (go cheap if you like… it’s getting covered after all), a large handful of spinach/arugula mix, cut in thin strips  (this is called a chiffonade), crumbled gouda cheese, mozzarella cheese, and  garlic salt.  I layered everything in order mentioned and added as much or as little as looked right to me at the moment.  The “pre-oven” pizza pic is on the left.  NOTE: for those of you wondering, my husband makes a mean pepperoni pizza with light sauce and light cheese… and NO wine.  LOL.

At the last moment,  I pulled out a bottle of Pinot Noir red wine that I had just opened and used my thumb to sprinkle the wine over my pizza.  Weird, I know, but it was one of those “why not” moments.  The pizza went into a pre-heated 475 degree oven for 10-15 minutes.  Don’t leave the house or plan to be too far away… this pizza can go from “almost perfect” to “burned” fairly quickly if you’re not watching.

With the extra liquid on top of my pizza, I needed to let it rest for a few minutes before cutting it into 8 pieces and inhaling… I mean, eating… my dinner.  It was a wonderful way to end the week.

May your evening meal be as entertaining AND delicious as ours!

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Recipe: A new twist on Pizza

I love making pizzas with my family. I say pizza with an “S” because I end up making individual pizzas for each of us… I halve, double, or make regular portions of my version of a Weight Watchers whole wheat pizza dough recipe and go from there, depending on who’s having dinner with us that evening. For M, it’s ham and pepperoni… for D, it’s a cheese pizza… if we’re including E for dinner, it’s just pepperoni… but for me, it’s a special black bean and corn salsa pizza. Doesn’t this look delicious?

Here’s how I start. The pizza dough recipe is supposed to make eight servings. After trying to make individual pizzas from this single recipe, I’ve learned that I need to either make 1.5 recipes or double to make four large enough pizzas to feed my guys… it takes A LOT to fill them up… but I digress. Here are the directions to make my pizza dough:

WW Whole Wheat Pizza Dough

Makes 8 servings

Sponge:

2 t active dry yeast

¼ cup lukewarm water

¼ cup all-purpose flour

Pizza Dough:

½ cup fat-free milk

1 1/3 cups all-purpose flour

½ cup whole-wheat flour

¼ t salt

2 pkt equal

1. To prepare sponge, in a large bowl, sprinkle yeast over the water; when the yeast looks wet, add flour and stir hard. Cover loosely with plastic wrap or a damp towel and let stand at room temperature for about 40 minutes.

2. To make the dough, stir the milk into the sponge. In a medium bowl, combine the all-purpose flour, whole-wheat flour, salt and equal. Add to the sponge and stir to blend.

3. Lightly sprinkle work surface with flour. Turn out the dough; knead until it become elastic and resilient, 10-12 minutes. *This is important… dough needs to be kneaded thoroughly for this to work.

4. Spray a large bowl with Pam, place dough in bowl and cover loosely with plastic wrap or damp towel and let rise in a warm, draft-free place until doubled in volume, 45-60 minutes.

5. Preheat oven to 450 degrees. Punch down dough, lightly sprinkle the work surface with flour and roll out dough to a 14” circle. Transfer dough to a baking sheet, arrange toppings and bake until lightly browned, about 10 minutes.

Per serving: 3 PointsPlus (1/8)

My NOTE: I make this dough into four individual pizzas that are rectangular and approximately 7”x14” (?). The pizzas are very thin, but I can cut them into 6-8 individual slices and be able to have my own pizza using 6 points for the dough. Totally worth it, imho…

Once the dough is done, I form each person’s pizza. For mine, I roll it into a rectangle (as noted above) and then spray with Pam and sprinkle garlic powder on top. I’m now ready to mix up my version of black bean and corn salsa. Using The Force, I mix a can of drained/rinsed black beans, an equal amount of fresh corn off the cob (or a can, drained and rinsed), mild salsa, some taco seasonings and some Cabernet Sauvignon. I like to also add a spoonful of pesto to add some depth to the taste and use about 1 cup of this mixture to top my pizza. The pesto recipe that I like best is one that my niece created and posted on her blog, PB Fingers and called Sunflower Seed and Walnut Pesto (http://www.pbfingers.com/2012/06/26/sunflower-seed-and-walnut-pesto/). If you want to read her blog, Peanut Butter Fingers, use this link and follow her for some terrific new recipes and great fitness ideas (http://www.pbfingers.com/). I would read this blog every day even if she wasn’t my niece!

After topping the pizza with your salsa, add your favorite cheese blend and follow the cooking directions as noted above. I used a blend of Asiago and Parmesan cheeses in the pizza I made the other night. Here’s how yummy it looked when I pulled it out of the oven.

I like to cut my pizza into 8 pieces and eat it with a knife and fork. There’s so much on top of this pizza crust that it’s just impossible to pick up and eat any other way. I hope you’ll try this pizza dough recipe sometime and play around with different toppings on your own pizza. There are franchises out there that make big money creating bizarre blends for pizzas… take a chance and create something that’s totally yours. You might be stunned at how well it all turns out!