Pizza Night at the Poes

We have a semi-regular pizza night (semi, because in the summer it's usually too danged hot to cook), where I set out all kinds of colourful veggies and toppings and just let the kids go wild building the pizza of their dreams. Usually I have to yell at them to stop hogging up all the toppings, because they like to pile theirs somewhere in the 2-3 inch category, leaving cheese for the rest of us. Fortunately for me, mozzarella still does okay for me. Unfortunately for them... I want my stinkin' toppings!

Something I like to do, to make things easier, is to make pizza crusts in individual sizes and freeze them in a stack. Then I can just thaw out what I want, build my pizza, and pop it into the oven. If I'm feeling really rushed, I'll pull out a pre-built pizza and cook it from frozen. My recipes for pizza crust (BOTH normal GF pizza crusts and Better Batter Flour Pizza Crusts) and full techniques and instructions for making pizza and crusts ahead, with every variation you can think of is on my regular GF, sadly neglected, blog.

This particular night, I was also experiementing with RAW food, and I tried a dehydrated pizza recipe from one of my favorite raw foods cookbooks, the Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine Book.

Okay, Let me just say... this was possibly the worst pizza I've had in my life. Bad enough not to give you the recipe... The toppings were pretty good (I picked them off and ate them), but the crust was like a huge, thick slab of pesto-flavoured nut-butter. It was rough, I tell you. ROugh Rough. Make-something-else-to-eat rough.

Fortunately, I'd grabbed a bunch of toppings from my sons (eggplant, onion, green pepper, tomato, chantarelle mushrooms, shaved brazil nuts, black olives, basil) and was able to peg together a Pizza Salad.

Pizza salad is essentially all those ingredients in a nice italian vinagarette, especially heavy on the fresh oregano. Even better after it's marinated for several hours. I ate this for two days.

As for the rest of the family, they had a really great time chowing down on real, cooked, hot pizza.

If you're inclined to make pizza, feel free to follow my basic directions on my blog.

Add whatever toppings you desire, and it's pizza heaven! The pictured pizza below had artichoke hearts, fresh bufaletta mozzarella, black olives, green peppers, chantarelle mushrooms, thinly sliced fresh heirloom tomatoes, and minced onions-n-garlic, oregano, and basil. Like Pizza Hut, only scads better for you!