Make Pizza, Not Muffins!

Turns out my blogs are just about food. I may start with a muffin concept, or an oatmeal concept, but when you get right down to it, they are about food in general.

This is an easy way to make a really quick dinner, without too many guilt pangs.
It starts with a frozen pizza. I usually buy an inexpensive plain cheese variety, and I do check the sodium content. Frozen pizzas are often notoriously high in sodium.

I keep a few of these frozen pizzas around for the evenings when making a meal "from scratch" is not going to happen.


I build a salad, or whatever tickles my fancy, on top of the cheese pizza. In the fridge this evening, I discovered half a box of mushrooms, a small bag of chopped kale I meant to use the other day, but forgot, a half a green pepper, and some cooked bulk Italian sausage. Also some leftover pasta sauce. I decided to slice a half an onion as well.


I cooked the cheese pizza for five minutes at 400º f, to give it a little start on its own, before doctoring it. Usually I pile the items of choice right on top of the cheese pizza. I decided to quickly saute the mushrooms and green pepper, sliced, for this meal. Then I popped it all in the oven for eight more minutes.

The pizza always looks better before it is cooked than after! Of course it tastes better after it is cooked, though. I usually grate a little extra cheese, and bake everything an additional five minutes. The cheese sort of "glues" everything down. My favorite cheese to use is swiss, because it is lower sodium than most cheeses. I only put an ounce or two on, and even people who don't think they like swiss cheese, seem to like the pizza.

It tastes like a pricey specialty pizza! You might be thinking that you don't have leftovers just sitting around to put on top of a pizza. Take a look, though. Many things work on a plain cheese pizza, from ham or cooked chicken and pineapple, to goat cheese and spinach. You can put raw spinach leaves right on top of the pizza, and they will cook up just fine. If you have frozen vegetables such as spinach or broccoli, thaw them in the micro, and squeeze the extra water out before putting them on your pizza. Thinly sliced raw garlic is great. I'll admit, this is not a purist's pizza, but it is fairly healthy and the more vegetables and/or fruit, the healthier. Yum.