The USDA did a study on pizza consumption and well, they found out that Americans eat a lot of pizza. Is anyone shocked by this?! I for one, am not. I love pizza. I would much rather make my own so that I know exactly what is in it. Donny & I threw this pizza together rather quickly the other night. We cheated and bought an already-made whole wheat pizza crust from Target. Probably not the healthiest crust ever, but definitely not the worst either. One of these days I will tackle making my own whole wheat crust……
Donny started by making a garlic olive oil to brush on the crust. He sauteed some minced garlic on low heat in extra virgin olive oil. You can actually buy garlic that has already been minced for you. Genius. You can kind of see the jar in the top left hand corner of this picture. This process took about 4-5 minutes. You could just brush olive oil on the crust, but garlic adds a little extra flavor.
Next Donny brushed the garlic olive oil onto the crust.
While he did that, I went ahead and gathered all the other pizza toppings.
The top bowl is shredded chicken, the bottom left is shredded mozzarella cheese (1/2 cup), and the bottom right is diced artichokes.
We had some leftover sun-dried tomatoes so Donny chopped a few up as well.
We had some pre-made pesto that I bought at Trader Joe’s in Denver (LOVE TJ’s). I spread about 2 TBSPs on the crust and then topped it with the 1/2 cup mozzarella.
The rest of the toppings were added over the cheese…..and it is ready for the oven! So easy.
The over was set at 400 degrees and it took about 10 minutes. The end result: delicious. Of course, before eating I added Cholula hot sauce (a must in my book). Here is the end result (pre-Cholula).
It was a square crust which is slightly awkward to slice in my opinion. I decided to just cut it down the middle and then cut those in half, total of four square pieces. You could also cut it like a regular pizza. The pieces would be smaller but you would have more of them. Either way works.
Pizza is another versatile meal. You can be creative, make it plain, or make a “garbage” pizza with anything and everything in your refrigerator. It is pretty hard to screw up pizza!
At some point while making the pizza Doug realized that we were not going to accidentally drop any chicken. As you can see, he decided napping was a better option.
Oh how hard this dog’s life must be…. poor thing!
What are your favorite pizza toppings?
