Pizza (with millet !?!)

We make a lot of pizza - without the slightest amount of guilt.  Well okay, every once in a while we order pizza and I do perhaps have a little guilt about that.  But most of time it's homemade pizza.  Interesting vegetables, less cheese, and homemade crust with whole grains.  I actually feel good about the amount of pizza we eat! 

Fiddlehead fern pizza with feta bombs

Starting from the bottom up.

Crust.  Making crust is ridiculously easy.  Google some recipes if you haven't made it before, but basically you mix flour (about a cup), water (about 1/3 cup), yeast (2 tsp), sugar (2 tsp), and olive oil (1 T).  Mix, kneed, cover, and let it rise.  Fleischmann's even offers a pizza yeast now that doesn't require proofing first.  Recently, perhaps because I was drinking wine while making dinner, I added 1/4 cup of millet to the dough.  It was awesome.  Added a tiny bit of crunch and flavor.  Including the millet also moved the crust from bad carb (i.e., highly refined flour) to good carb (i.e., whole grains).  After this first wine-induced experiment, we never make a pizza without millet. 

Sauce.  Sometimes we use something homemade, but most of the time we just use jar spaghetti sauce.  Organic brands tend to have less sugar, salt, and preservatives so we tend to but those.  Pick whatever you like, be careful not to apply too liberally or your pizza might be soggy.

Vegetable toppings.  Here's the fun part.  Use anything.  Spinach, roasted radishes, potato, arugula, bell pepper, roasted garlic, thinly sliced fresh garlic, zucchini, broccoli, olives, asparagus....really anything!  Since it's early summer, we even made a couple of pizzas with fiddlehead ferns.  We also made a pizza loaded with chard, stems and all.  This is also great way to use up whatever you have in your refrigerator - that half an onion or 1/3 head of broccoli - reducing food waste. There are so many amazing vegetable options, you'll find that you won't even miss the meat.

Rainbow chard with red pepper pizza.  [Chard was diced and under the cheese]

Rainbow radishes and spinach pizza.  [Thickly slice radishes and saute first]

Cheese.  If you want pizza to be a regular part of your life and you don't want to be a contestant on The Biggest Loser, you are going to have to cut back on the cheese.  We do this by using stronger cheese in smaller quantity - generally sharp cheddar cheese.  Cheese like feta, goat, blue are great for "cheese bombs" - small clumps on your pizza.
 

Hmm.  I may need to go raid our refrigerator and make some pizza.