Lyssa's Corner #1: Homemade Pizza

Today we have a special guest blogger, my girlfriend better known as the boss. She does the cooking and the recipe making around the house (my cooking is something like 1 piece of bread, add peanut butter, add the other piece of bread, and eat. But here is a real recipe:

Welcome to Lyssa’s corner!

Adam has talked about us having our groceries delivered by GreenBean delivery. They don’t offer many “ready-made” items. It’s hard to find organic and healthy “processed” food without paying big for it. We try to process our own food, like when we make our own yogurt and bread. The same has come true for our pizza cravings!!!!

Before we became green, vegetarian hippies, we were your typical lazy consumer. Adam worked full-time and more at a factory and I was a full-time college student with a part-time job. Most nights I was tired and didn’t feel like cooking dinner. So we would end up getting pizza delivered twice a week on average, but five times in a week wasn’t that unusual of an occurrence. We no longer do that for a few reasons:

1.       The gas burned to bring us the pizza

2.       All delivery pizza companies in our area do not use organic or all natural ingredients. A lot of chemicals are in “fast food” pizza.

3.       There have been some pizza chains that admit to putting meat “juice” in their sauce for added flavor. This may be okay with you if you’re still a meat-eater but not if you’ve become an herbivore.

4.       The cost!!! The lowest we ever paid for delivery pizza dinner was around $23 plus tip!

5.       The calories! The ingredients in fast food pizzas are high in calories! Full-fat cheese (and who doesn’t order extra cheese), commercial pizza sauce has fat (probably from the meat “juice”), all those meat toppings and refined white flour crust. There’s hardly any nutritional value for the caloric buck.

Old habits die-hard. We still LOVE pizza! When we visit Whole Foods we will get a slice of vegetarian pizza. But, it was Friday night. I worked all week, had to work my side job in the morning and didn’t feel like driving all the way to Whole Foods. I decided to make the pizza myself!

For the crust:

2 cups whole-wheat flour (delivered in bulk or can buy in bulk from Whole Foods)

1 cup hot water (I used the hottest water that came out of the tap)

2 tsp of yeast

1 tbsp organic olive oil

¾ tsp sea salt

Combine all dry ingredients in a mixing bowl. I put the olive oil in the hot water before mixing in with the dry ingredients. Mix well, about 3 minutes. It’ll look weird like this:

But that’s okay. Cover with plastic wrap and let dough rise to desired size. I let mine sit for about 20 minutes. After that, I spread the dough on a pan, or cookie sheet. Before you lay it down, spray the pan with olive oil (I use my awesome Misto! I use that instead of store-bought cooking spray, it doesn’t have any of the chemicals). I found the dough to be a little sticky. While spreading the dough, I sprayed the top with olive oil so it didn’t stick to my hands. It made it much easier to work with this way. When you’re done it’ll look something like this:

I chopped up some shiitake mushrooms, green pepper and yellow onion for toppings.

Green Bean delivery did bring me this Muir Glen pizza sauce. I have become a fan of this brand because their diced tomatoes are delicious and their ketchup is AWESOME! I spread the sauce on the dough then topped the pizza. I like to do a little cheese first, then toppings, then a little cheese on top. Let’s the toppings melt in more.

Put it in the oven on 425 degrees and I let it go for about 16-17 minutes. The next time I make it I’ll let it go for about 18-20. I like a crispy crust.

And there you have it. Completely whole wheat, vegetarian and chemical free pizza! And it was delicious!

Now for the calories:

This is for 1/8^th of the pizza. This isn’t the typical dinner for us, but it didn’t break the calorie bank either. It was a great, guilt-free splurge!