My husband has a new friend – a natural peanut butter eating friend. Now, this may not seem like such an odd friendship, my husband and this man, especially for you Whole Foods/Fresh Market shoppers. But my husband grew up on Jif. He loves casseroles, fried chicken, mashed potatoes and biscuits and gravy. The Natural Peanut Butter ethos doesn’t really go with biscuits and gravy.
So a few weeks ago my husband came home from work (where this friendship was formed) and announced, “Honey, I want to eat what [Natural Peanut Butter eating friend] eats. He never feels guilty about anything he eats. He’s healthy.” At first, I might not have believed it were true if my husband was not a God-fearing man, which he is. Inside of me a war was raging: HURRAY! My Husband won’t have a heart attack anytime soon! And NO!!!!! I want an excuse to cook with grease! (I have become adept at the whole “my husband wants me to cook like this” cop-out.) Of course my verbal response was, “Of course, sweetie! I’ll make whole wheat bread from scratch starting tomorrow!” (Well, not really, but I was encouraging. Who would feel right about being anything otherwise?)
Thus began our new way of life. My husband is more strict than me. He drinks a protein shake for breakfast (recipe to follow in later posts for all you readers just itching to start the Natural Peanut Butter Diet), a turkey sandwich on whole wheat with mustard and pickles (hold the mayo!) for lunch, apples and raw almonds for snacks and a healthy, low fat, high fiber dinner. Obviously it’s my job to come up with the low fat, high fiber dinner.
Enter the homemade veggie pizza. For those of you non-natural-peanut-butter eaters, don’t despair. Just because my husband decided to start eating this way doesn’t mean his taste buds got a clue. He still LOVES the Meat Lovers Pizza from Dominoes. My husband LOVES this veggie pizza.
I start with a whole wheat crust, which I found on the Food Network’s Website. Here’s the web address, just to give credit where credit is due. I make just the crust here, not the topping the recipe suggests. I made a double recipe, because I like to have leftovers the next night.
This crust was so easy to make. I did everything by hand, which made me feel incredibly rustic and able to survive in a world without Kitchen Aids, should, God Forbid, such a world ever come to pass. I think I will do bread this way from now on, unless it’s just too much dough to handle. It made me feel so one with the bread! As a side note, I should mention that I used Rapid Rise Yeast. I don’t know why in the world you would go the slow route if you don’t have to.
For the topping I used:
1) Pasta Sauce (Kroger, Parmesan and Romano flavor – Long live the OFF BRAND!)
2) Squash, Carrots (Sliced into sticks and then chopped into small pieces), Grape Tomatoes (halved), Raw Spinach, and red Onion (Sliced thin, on MY side of the pizza) and Part-Skim Mozzarella Cheese.
After following the instructions for the crust, I layered it with the sauce, some cheese, and lots of veggies. All the measurements are up to you here. I baked it at 450 degrees for about 25-30 minutes. The recipe called for 35 minutes, but my oven doesn’t waste time lally gagging around. It gets the job done. I’m trying to teach it to wash the dishes.
If you wanted to have super-fresh pizza the second night, you can do what I did and bake the other crust for a little less time sans toppings. You can saute the veggies for pizza #2 right before your dinner time, add the sauce, cheese and cooked veggies on top of the already baked crust, and pop it in the oven just to melt the cheese. I added fresh chopped garlic the second night, and it was a nice addition.
It has been almost three weeks (minus the week of Christmas) that my husband has become a friend of protein and fiber and a foe of “bad” fats. This new way of life thankfully allows for a “cheat” meal, which means I won’t have to give up butter, oil or sugar all together. I will keep you posted on our efforts, and the results! In the meantime – make a veggie pizza and shock your friends and family with how good it is. Ten bucks says you will be buying Natural Peanut Butter next week.
3 Comments
January 21, 2008 at 3:06 pm
[...] highs have been in the 20s and you don’t have a very good climate for yeast to rise. Enter my eager-beaver oven. I talked with it about whether it would like to help with this process, and it immediately began [...]
March 7, 2008 at 2:54 pm
[...] husband, as you all well know, eats natural peanut butter. Nope. He hasn’t given it up. He even came home this week wanting to join a local food co-op [...]
April 8, 2008 at 12:51 am
[...] 2 slices of homemade vegetable pizza [...]