Meatless Supper Club meal #5 - Veggie Pizza

Pizza is an important topic when it comes to food. Everyone loves pizza. Everyone has their favorite kind, their favorite brand, their favorite home recipes. A lot of the most popular and what I would have previously called the best pizzas are loaded with meat. All kinds of meat. The more varieties of meat you could find on a single slice the better, seems to be what most pizza joints would claim.

Now I have to say that there are plenty of veggie pizza options around Portland and many of the chain restaurants carry veggie pizza varieties as well, which is great. But we have always enjoyed homemade pizza and we could never quite get the veggie combo just right when we'd try it ourselves. So since becoming vegetarian we've often succumbed to the temptation to just pick up a veggie pizza at the store rather than suffering through more attempts at a less than perfect homemade veggie pizza.

However, we have finally figured out a great blend that we love. We've tested it out on a few non-vegetarian friends and it has been a hit every time. The kids still prefer the cheese or cheese with pineapple variety of pizza, but I think kids eating vegetarian pizza will forever elude us and I'm OK with that for now.



Here's our favorite combo:

Get your favorite pizza dough ready and roll it out. We like the recipe found in The Joy of Cooking, but if we're in a time crunch the fresh made dough at WinCo is a close second.

Spread with your pizza sauce. I think any pasta sauce will do, I rarely buy or make special "pizza" sauce.

Sprinkle the sauce with grated Parmesan cheese and 2-3 cloves of finely chopped garlic. This is such a great little addition that adds tons of flavor to the end result.

Spread a very thin layer of cheddar cheese.

Top that with a layer of chopped onions, cover with a layer of sliced mushrooms.

Very finely chopped summer squash can come next. We don't always add this layer though.

Cover entire pizza with fresh baby spinach.

Generously top with grated mozzarella.

Bake according to instructions of your particular pizza dough of choice. And top with fresh chopped tomatoes before serving.



You will never want to eat Papa Murphy's veggie pizza again. (Even though theirs is really yummy).

Check out Enviromom this Friday for more meatless recipe ideas. I'm so excited about them all. I've already got my contributions planned out for the next few weeks. A few more soups to tuck away in the recipe file for cold winter nights, a sweet potato casserole that is perfect for once a month freezer cooking, and a pseudo corned beef that helped me to survive that first St. Patrick's Day as a vegetarian. See you next week.